THE WRITER & LITERARY FOREPLAY COLLECTION

Hear the Colors and See the Music

I was asked recently, how I view and look at writing. First , yes I look at it as a literary endeavor , after all it is a words to paper strung together to make a cohesive tale come alive. Come alive with clear imagery that hopefully will allow the reader to hear the colors and see the music. However….. I see writing as a “visual “ medium. Word paintings to impact a person to draw them into the storyline to make an emotional impact and to feel connected to the storyline and to be part of it based on their memories of similar events told in the story or other memories through my words or some other familiar feelings (love, fear, sadness, happiness) in their own lives. Writing visually can evoke as fully as the cubism of Picasso or Warhol’s Modern Art of everyday items from soup cans to trash cans or the mist like impressionist gentleness of Renoir, or especially the post impressionist synthetist of Paul Gauguin’s Tahitian studies. The writer first needs a canvas on which to place his colors and hues and textures on. To me the story’s geographic setting and description is my canvas. This then becomes the “home” or “canvas” of my creation, my vision of a word painting. Once the canvas has been chosen you then get your palette and paintbrush to begin the creation by developing the storyline with antagonist and protagonist collateral characters along with some experimental colors and tones in the form of verbs, adverbs, pronouns, adjectives and nouns. Now you have your painting underway to completion. To highlight and compliment to “landscape’ or “portrait” created you need a simple frame in which to display it in it’s best light. (Never mind those old Louis the VIV gold carved monstrosities the size of Versailles Palace itself) It should compliment not overwhelm. The frame is the opening sentence (“it was the best of times and the worst of times”) and the closing sentence (“Nobody saw it coming or heard it coming until it was too late”) These are called hooks. Once the paint has dried and the work is framed properly the damned thing is ready to adorn the wall of some imaginary literary salon to be viewed, read and hopefully impacted. I also see it as a sculpture being formed as Rodin created his “Thinker” Writing is the clay or stone or marble I use to emulate the works of Greek artists from 400 B.C. to today. Molding, fashioning, chipping, scraping until at last Venus de Milo appears as literature and my words take on the form of a marble statue designed to be viewed as a whole and not merely in pieces. Once read the totality would become evident. Writing is also photography. My imagination is my viewfinder while my passion for a new writing project is my shutter speed and my total vision of the piece is my aperture for controlling the storyline consistently or as I refer to it “my depth of field” to control clarity. You can write in black and white or in color...the overall imagery will be determined by the reader. Writing to me also has a beat and cadence through the rhythm of the piece. The flow of words and concept. I write to music to give me a sense of cadence that hopefully translates to the page. Some pieces end of with an organized symphonic feel of coordinated orchestration of sensitivity while the next piece might have a rockabilly beat saying the hell with form over substance. In effect I write so that in some way you can hear the colors and see the music...>

Literary Porn and The Fortune Cookie Writers Orgasm

I was asked by the Writer’s Edge Magazine to discuss the writing process, specifically where ideas for a writer come from. For each writer the answer is different as to sources. Perhaps it’s death rays from Mars from our TV sets or left over radiation from Chernobyl. I have friends who post on my pieces here at FB and the talk of imagination always comes up. To a degree yes, imagination is part of the equation E=MC2 or if you are a Deetroiter E=MC5. Tinfoil hats are perfect for deflecting Death Rays by the way…. My new piece called The Shanghai Fortune Cookies and the Puppeteer Trilogy is an example of “when worlds collide”, “the worlds” being the outside stimuli that has triggered an inside idea that will split your mental atom (actually before it fucks with your head!) The new “Trilogy” piece is the result of a mental Ménage à Trois, a good old fashioned threesome that adds spice to life. I read a lot of magazines, but the main ones are National Geographic (Tribal T & A Porn for naked villagers of some hidden tribe oblivious to the 21st century and clothing); The Smithsonian Magazine (History Porn so I can keep up with the Civil War just to see how it ends); and The New Yorker Magazine (Urban & Urbane Cultural Porn for my Film, Theater & Arts Fix); every now and then I toss in a Mother Earth News to get the latest in compost technology, how to properly raise and care for pygmy goats and how to make my own candles in the event I should ever have to make my own candles, care for a pygmy goat or build that compost pile that is the envy of the neighborhood...so far I have been spared all of the above...except for the compost pile. It’s a dandy! “Trilogy” came about from three articles not related to each other from three different publications and then tossed into my Hamilton Beach mental mixer. The Smithsonian Magazine had an article recently regarding the Grant Wood Exhibit at the Whitney Museum (I don’t think it’s the Whitney Houston Museum, but you never know!) It discussed his agrarian porn tendencies of populist middle America art..barns, farms, and the American Gothic painting, his most famous depicting the hot couple with stern looks and a pitchfork. Grant was also a homosexual so the stern look on his face in self portraits probably depicts how it was impossible to come out of the back forty closet in Iowa. It’s also been said he has corn prominently displayed in many of his paintings and his secret phallic code. Call it Cornstalk Envy if you must label it at all. Article Two was from The Nat Geo on the history of Chinese foods, especially the making of fortune cookies and their history. Not one damn nude in the bunch! At the time of reading about fortune cookies I also had my headphones on listening to a Traffic album when The Shanghai Noodle Factory song came on...it was fate I tell you...a novella was born! The third article was in the New Yorker on the American Ballet Theater and how it has changed ballet from the staid Bolshoi bullshit for the upper crust crowd to a form of truly modern George Balanchine ballet that has been brought to street level for everyone...even a New Yorker! In Trilogy, one of the protagonists tries to duplicate Wood’s rural ravings on canvas. Her environment however dwells in the very urban universe of Boston, with nary a red barn in sight so she discovers her true compass and rather than create art from anothers environment takes on the Urban experience by using discarded items found on the street to use as her three dimensional paint on canvas to highlight the waste of our discard, toss away and throw away society with metal and plastic discards causing wounds….in other words be one with your own environment and let nature empower you and not overpower you. Besides it gave me a chance to toss Iron Eyes Cody into the story..remember the tears and pollution poster child of the 70’s? Protagonist #2 is a writer seeking to write the next great American novel, but by trying on some rather large loafers following in the footsteps of the giant Hemingway before him he discovers he just can’t ride on Hem coattails. He is frustrated for the reason that until he reaches his lofty goal, if ever, he is reduced to writing from the lower rung of the literary ladder. Film review, music reviews, book reviews, sitcom scripts and the like especially In this case he also writes one line fortunes for fortune cookies and produces puppet shows in the park to satisfy his urge to to be the next Broadway hot shot, Soon he finds his own compass and does become a success by blazing his own trail through the theater arts and the literary labyrinth. Protagonist #3 is a wannabe ballet Dancer who is frustrated trying to break into traditional ballet productions but turned down as she is mediocre at best. She practices every day in her ground level apartment but is interrupted constantly by the street hipster band who play blues and improv jazz for passerby. In time she begins to blend ballet movements with blues and rock and creates a new genre of modern dance (Take that Isadora Duncan and Twyla Tharp). She and the band end up, performing this new fornication of form and sound to a boffo SRO crowd at the American Ballet Theater along with her new band...yep the hipsters and their early morning sax! All in all the Trilogy is saying...don’t be the next whoever..be the first of YOU! Blaze your own path….be original...be one with your environment and stimuli….let the natural course of nature and your own creativity empower you…. Now I must tend to my compost pile and the pygmy goats are hungry...they’re eating my car...

The Writer as Prostitute

It’s been said a freelance writer gets paid by the piece….by the word and most importantly, Perchance! It’s one thing to write, another to market yourself to the buying publications. Let’s face it writers are members of the “world’s oldest profession” as we spread our literary legs for a good bang! Make that a check. I do many interviews regarding writing as a craft, an art, and a business. How the hell does one get started? They say it takes six months to get on a roll...a payroll...that is. I wa fortunate as when I write for a mag as a freelancer by the third or so article I’m on staff as a regular contributor an in three cases as Senior Staff Writer for B2B publications and I do corporate PR pieces for BMW and others...the real money. Snag a B2B and a corporate account and you feel like a high class hooker at only the best hotels. I also write for arts publications in Europe, leftist magazines in North America and Europe and a car mag in China that is published in German (the pub Dieter is German, also published in Chinese as wife is Chinese and have by remote research covered the Tokyo Auto Shows. Dieter takes videos and I do the words after interviews.) I got started writing small pieces for some local publications in California, Wine Country type articles, travel etc then moved on to Classic Car Cruising mags. Usually for 50 bucks a pop for 750 words. (Now I can command up to $1,500 for 1,000 words and more for my verbose 2,500 hundred word tomes for Marijuana publications alone) Some of my two dozen monthly clients pay less but for 500 words I generally get on average $750 per piece. It keeps me in drugs and alcohol. How to get started? I got lucky. My work in mags and online was first discovered by author, Ken Kesey who became in effect my mentor and encouraged me to write my first book, “The Roadhead Chronicles.” He would advise me and encourage me to keep writing everyday. Like Joseph Wambaugh said in an interview when asked now that he was popular when do you write? His answer…”Now I only write when I’m in the mood., and I make damned sure I’m in the mood by 7 a.m.!” I do too...my day begins around 3 a.m. as I empty my cranium of thought to digital paper. Kesey introduced my work to Ben Fong Torres, columnist and former editor of Rolling Stone Magazine (when it was good!) Ben was starting a new business with corporate accounts who needed PR work type articles so he told me “I’ll form a new category for you ...the fun Department”) so that took me to another level. Next my work was put in front of Peter Coyote, actor, voice over actor, author, etc. which lead to some script work for a retro tv show on pop culture in L.A. and my biggest project in Hollywood...the DVD History of Disneyland and World to show it’s growth from Anaheim to Tokyo and Florida and France in regards to animatronics and the Haunted House. (A six month project by the way, script approval, weekly skype meetings, research, interviews with Disney engineers, etc.) The finished book I wrote got into the hands of some Myspace friends through my webcast radio program...Joe Cocker, Eric Burdon, Mike Smith (lead singer for the Dave Clark Five, and Peter Noone, think Herman’s Hermits. I was also fortunate on Myspace that my writings and postings attracted the attention of Sean Lennon and through him to Yoko Ono. Both also have my book. I also don’t usually join writers groups s they are usually whine sessions about writers block...no such thing! I do belong to 20 Dissident Writers where we publish an anthology of Neo Beat writings in book form and I belong to the Outlaw Poet Society by invitation of my friend and poet and performance artist Dennis..a proser amongst the poets ha... So I say to get started...get your work in front of the right (write?) people. Have faith in yourself and write, write, write!

Under the Influence

I’ve been asked here, yet never quite answered, but now I have been asked by one of my magazine publishers to talk about my influences and how I got started freelance writing, or in my words….Writing Under the Influence without a license! At an early age my parents had a collection of albums that to me as a treasure trove when I’d pop them on the spindle and give them a spin on the hi fi when they went out for the evening. Me and my friends would absorb the likes of Lenny Bruce, Redd Fox, Shelley Berman, Bob Newhart, Stan Freberg, Moms Mabley, the Blooper Albums and the singer Rusty Warren of “Knockers Up! Fame. On the telly those that carved out a piece of real estate in my psyche were Steve Allen, Ernie Kovacs, Jack Paar, Groucho Marx, Carl Reiner, and later, hugely, Johnny Carson. Writers were Mark Twain, (read all, even his massive volume of short stories, Terry Southern (Think ‘Candy”) Anthony Burgess, Nabokov, Kerouac, Burroughs, Steinbeck, Hemingway, Dostoevsky, Leon Uris, Hunter Thompson, Tennessee Williams, and the plays of Henrik Ibsen (I’d buy the book of his plays and study the cadence of the characters dialogue and Tolkein (Read the trilogy twice, never accepted the films...the characters were already in my head the way I wanted them not someone else’s vision) Radio? Larry Lujack out of Chicago and John Landecker also from Chicago. They all shaped my attitude and approach to life and my craft. Now as for getting started as a freelance writer. I had some massive help to go with my luck. I started writing and placing pieces on line not realizing I could ever get paid. This brought my work to the attention of author Ken Kesey who became my mentor and told me I should write a book (The Roadhead Chronicles is the result..my first book) We spoke and wrote often, he answering my questions and cracking the writing whip. Before Ken died, on his website on an archive page he put a letter from me to him on the page ..on top of mine was one from Neal Cassidy and below mine, one from Jerry Garcia..I was in good company. He soon turned my work over to Ben Fong Torres, journalist and editor of Rolling Stone in it’s rock heyday who referred to the works as ha...The second coming of Hunter Thompson. (He was being kind me thinks.) He hired me to write pieces for him. He had a company that provided content to mags and b2b publications. Most of the writers were excellent but the subjects dry so Ben gave me my own category “The Fun Category” and began selling my works to mags, then more mags, etc. My work also caught the attention of Peter Coyote, former Digger in the Haight, actor, voice over artist on numerous PBS shows etc. Through them and my radio show on the web I was approached soon by Peter Noone (Think Hermans Hermits) Mike Smith, singer for the DC5, Eric Burdon and Joe Cocker all of whom purchased the book and told others about it. I then could incorporate all this in resume form in my cover letters to mags as my writing voice grew and got my career going….with more than just a little help from my friends…..

Writing and RCA Plugs

“All gurus and professed prophets who intend to profit should be imprisoned or drafted.”

That being said it is merely an exercise line from a piece, long forgotten many piston pumping lunar cycles ago. It was when I was comparing writing segments and tying them together into a bundle that had beat, cadence and flow to using a jumble or red, yellow, white RCA plugs to mate Marantz turntables, FM radio and Akai 3 speed reel to reel tape recorders to create a real live jet propelled break the sound barrier sound system.

I was asked recently about what I term “A Writing Formula to Dispel Bad Mojo” Each formula is different for each writer. Unlike most professions a writer has to write the moment an idea grabs him by the throat. I keep a hand held tape recorder, a small writing journal and colored ink pens, (I prefer red or blue ink) on my desk or nightstand and when walking or hiking, I keep them and a camera in a small backpack so I’m ready to blast any ideas out of the sky where they can disappear easily and immediately transcribe them to tape or page. That way they are my prisoners to be released or paroled later incorporated into a piece I’m working on.

I like to write looking out my large window on the world to a vast wooded area of oak and pine trees, (I use the pine cones in spring and summer as bbq fuel to add flavor to my wonder burgers and chicken breasts on the grill) where I can enjoy the birds who alight on my two bird feeders watching them for delightful diversion as I listen to the gentle near zen hypnotic wind chimes, (plural) I have stationed on my patio/deck to add a touch of Asian ambiance.

Music when needed to propel my pages along can be anything from my Chess Records History of Blues to Ramones, piece dependent decides to musical infusion. Sometimes classical music permeates but when I need a real junkie fix I rely on Jimmy Page and company. You can almost by the pace of the piece determine what artist was the gearshift of the finished product.

Content yes is diverse...politics, sex, religion, music, art, pop culture, parody, pulp, books, comics, bio’s etc. A writer has to diversify and explore instead of remaining in a cryogenically frozen genre where no cure is forthcoming...by exploring other realms for writing it frees you inside...expands like a latex bra your horizons and makes a believer of you...the world is not flat...you won’t fall off the edge if you don’t explore new genres….

Reading is imperative to writing. I don’t mean Writing 101 or English Major for Dummies. Read Nabokov, Burgess, Joseph Conrad, King, anyone…

Most of all...Write every day...every single freakin’ day...good advice from cop writer Joseph Wambaugh,,,when asked when he writes now that he is a success,,,,his answer..

“I only write when I’m in the mood...and I make damn sure I’m in the mood by 9 AM!”

The Writers: Sex,, It’s Not Just for Breakfast Anymore

Ever since I saw the film “Misery” and marvelled at the delightfully deranged performance given by Kathy Bates holding her favorite writer prisoner, I almost decided to hock my typewriter at a pawn shop and hop a freighter to the Ivory Coast. Anywhere away from the hounds of groupie hell that can emerge from a Barnes and Noble House of Literary Horror.

I had already had a career as a rock and roll DJ and had experienced numerous groupies, and three bonafide stalkers that scared the rock and roll guano out of me. Always lurking in the dark, sometimes breaking into my car to make a love nest in the back seat and once following me along a forest road in Northern Michigan to where I was living at the time.

True, sex was a good part of the Vinyl Empire for a DJ, and sex with a listener was as common as a condom in Caracas. A groupie under a turntable doing the 501 button fly blues while “Hotel California” meandered it’s way through the airwaves gave you ample time to reach the finish line before Joe Walsh hit his last note. overall the body count isn’t important, but, it was continuous with an insatiable appetite fueled by drugs and adrenalin. Some were married, some were single, some were girls. some were women. All had one thing in common. Sex was the breakfast of champions.

Now I write for a living, and have found that writers too, have an appetite for an estros extravaganza, putting the subject matter on the table for a cerebral examination. Sex, I said, not chick-it romance novels by Charlotte Bronte or Julia Quinn that are geared to the crowd looking for quick flutter of the heart with tales of being rescued by Errol Flynn in his guise as Fabio with hair flying in the wind and his sword and penis raised high on the high seas.

I mean sex, the kind of sex that gets down and downright literary that explores the issue with a focus on anything from the “Joy of Sex” to the depraved debauchery of the Marquis de Sade and everything in between. The first example I can think of that came close to crossing the line were the lesbian writings of Sappho around 600 B.C.

According to the Book of Gentalia Genesis, "God created Woman in her own image...." It was the germination of the seed of lesbianism that penetrated deep into the soil of the Garden of Eden inserting its literary dildo into the vagina of Lesbian literary history ever since it loaded up with high voltage batteries in those madcap glory days of the Greek Empire. Homosexual practices were not uncommon in the carnal culture of Greece. Let's face it. Oedipus had thing for doing his own mom...so incestuous relationships were also probably more common in Greece than in the South today.

Lesbian lit which I lovingly refer to as "clit lit" is a rich, fertile orgasmic body of work that spans the ages and can trace it's masturbatory roots to the era of 600 BC when lesbianism and it's bisexual bi-product split the atom of same gender love and ushered in the pre-atomic ancient age of explosive works of the gender bending genre of homosexual "boys will be girls" and lesbian "girls will be boys" prose and poetry. ts impact created an exciting girl on girl eruption equal to the heat given off by a hot, flowing lava filled vagina. It was to be a sexual Journey to the Center of the Earth where the libido was fuel injected and lush labia’s blossomed in a land of verdant vulvas.

The first “Bestseller” on the list and still going strong today, no not the bible although there is a hell of a lot of begating going on with hookers and other “street” people as they say “in a Biblical Sense” but I’m talking about the Third Century when the Kama Sutra rolled off the papyrus production line with a plethora of positions compiled by the celibate sage Vatsyayana in Northern India. He compiled the listings of positions and can’t help thinking, was his elation due to ejaculation? Did he celebrate now and celibate less? If he had lived into the 20th Century would he have discovered Twister? Or Duct Tape for those private boudoir moments?

Which leads us to the macabre sexual manifestations of one, Mssr. Marquis de Sade. Purveyor and pursuer of perverse persuasions, perchance you’ve heard of him? Ladies and Gentlemen...let’s “whip up” a big hand for that madcap Marquis here at Improv Night at the S and M Club. (Rimshots and laughter and screams of painful ecstacy permeate the atmosphere as dog collared submissives are guided to center stage by a dedicated cadre of Dominating Dames in black leather in a lather with a frenzy for fetishista frolic)

While incarcerated in the Bastille in 1784, he wrote Les 120 Journees de Sodome (120 Days of Sodom) on a roll of paper 40 feet long..sorry Jack Kerouac, it’s been done before!) The scroll was a role call of a variety pack of happy meal sexual perversions.

His future works infuriated Napoleon who also had home imprisoned but like a bizarre sexual energizer bunny he kept on writing about what he knew best...sado masochism. Eventually all his books on the subject of sex were banned in France until the 1960’s. The works were read in “underground” circles in the 19th Century, mainly by artists, writers and other of us degenerates viewed his views as liberation of the animal instincts in all of us.

Today he is in literary circles placed on a perverted pedestal and hailed as the first of the “modernecrivains maudits (“damned writers”) or the first Gonzo Journalist who put himself into his societal musings beating Hunter Thompson to the punch by almost 200 years!! Fear and Loathing in the Bastille?

The Writer ‘s Orbital Alignment of Planetary Pharmaceuticals

Alter egos and altered states are the stock in trade of some who prose and others who wax poetic in a make believe world of reasonable rhyme where lyrical lilts flow like embroiled lava surging from the pen of the pen named.

F. Scott Fitzgerald, who was hip flasking daily during the age of the flapper in the riotous Roaring 1920’s was falling deeper into an alcoholic abyss by the 1930’s and was certified dead as a doornail in the 1940’s. The Great Gatsby left behind a treasure trove of alcohol based literature and a doped up schizophrenic Zelda. Hunter Thompson, no stranger to alcohol and drugs, copied F. Scott’s “Great Gatsby” in longhand in it’s entirety in order to get the actual feel and flow of the writing and style of the Great One.

During the societal restraining order of the Victorian Age, altered states reached epic proportions as writers propelled there epic tomes fueled by the intake of too many combo cocktails of opium and morphine. Edgar Allan Poe, was perhaps as well known for his alcohol, opium and laudanum addictions as he was for “Annabelle Lee” allowing his tell tale mind to tell about tell tale hearts, and today, amidst a sober mist we rave madly about his “Raven” written while he was raving, as he ravished the page of words of his avian masterpiece.

William Faulkner said, “A writer without a bottle of whiskey, is like a chicken with it’s goddamned head cut off!” Hemingway, Faulkner, Raymond Chandler, John Cheever, O. Henry, Dylan Thomas, Dorothy Parker, Truman Capote and Kerouac…. and the lit beat goes on. The damned list is almost as long as Kerouac’s scroll of “On The Road” in it’s original form prior to the editors having at it with the relish of cannibals.

Those are just some of the 20th Century inebriated literati, as booze and books do a fanciful flaming fandango in a forest of fiction and fiction that is non-. Hemingway, one not to hem and haw, said “Write when drunk...edit when sober!” He is correct.

Some writers settle for a mere cup of caffeine, although now it has to a certified cappuccino or literary latte drunk while writing wearing a beret at a bistro cafe. Others prefer java, pure and simple, black, no sugar or cream. By drinking strong coffee you will end up with an output of Raymond Chandler tough guy private eye noir guys. Drinking Seattle lattes, you’ll end up being a damned poet and write about flowers and whales. Drink a mocha anything and you lose machismo and will be consigned to the Capote Compost with overdone gesticulations pouring from you as you limp and lisp your way to the mens room.

When I began writing at 17 in Haight Ashbury I was hopped up on speed and weed and LSD. Great triumphant trumpets heralded my as yet unknown literary emergence from a cocoon of anonymity, at least in my own mind. The weed and LSD created the images I clearly wanted to plaster to the blank pages of my writing journal, spraycan graffiti on an alley wall, while the high octane speed created an amphetamine anthology that to his day I cannot understand when I read my old journals. It wasn’t the drugs fault...alone. I was a kid living on the streets with a chip on my shoulder, and did not have any literary muscle to exercise or flex yet. A writer has a voice, mine was unsure of itself at the time, and the drugs didn’t make the interpretation any clearer. In effect, I was speaking in tongues, numb tongues I might add..I was not a loud voice in the wilderness...I was a a comfortably numb mime!

Later, in the army, writing a little for an anti-military underground newspaper, I had matured to a novice level of controlling the thought process while still under the influence of LSD, weed and speed I now added opium, morphine and hashish to the volatile confusion of psychedelic fusion ...but now I could make sense of it all and it wasn’t a scattered jumble of jigsaw pieces. It was actually beginning to take shape and form so I increased the intake of pills and anything else I could get my hands on, uppers, downers, (Darvon a favorite) benzedrine, dexedrine, mescaline, LSD, marijuana, opium, morphine, and strangely, no booze..I was a purist afterall. (There was three times the drug use in the military at the time then there was in Haight Ashbury..one two three what are we fighting for? ‘Nam Weed!!!)

Once released to the wilds from the captivity of the khaki confines of Gimme an F Troop, I returned to a deteriorating Detroit, hanging out at Wayne State University and the northwest passage of the Cass Corridor as a writer in residence in the crumbling inner cit. It was here that I formed a theater group of thespians and yes, two very erotic lesbians (one was bi-sexual so I did have a romp with her), and began writing plays while stoned on cocaine and a blind date with heroin added to my daily intake of marijuana and speed. By now I had been consuming vast quantities of drugs for almost eight years starting at the age of 15, and by now my sex drive was on overdrive as well and eros and estros were now added to my addictions.

The first play I wrote was a benefit for a drug rehab center and after our opening night the entire cast got higher than Richard Branson on a balloon in the virgin stratosphere. Irony for the ages.

I was able with help to eliminate the harder drugs from my daily menu (a lot of help, support, methadone, sweats, seclusion) but it was hard. I was now a human yo yo on a short fuse string, ready to burst into flames any minute. To counteract the uppers, a shot of heroin, to corral the heroin, more uppers. Eventually I was back down to a reasonable level of weed and speed, and damned if alcohol didn’t enter the spotlight center stage as I began writing more plays and short stories, always fueled by speed weed as I now referred to my laced reefer. My writing became more personal, my third persons were getting layered and emerging from a fog of my own making and now were taking form and shape as I injected myself into them, or rather injected THEM as composite elements into the pieces that became increasingly autobiographical.

The prior drug use and personal introspection it forced me to acknowledge made writing more interesting for me, and allowed me to examine more and different aspects of life and subject matter as seen from my perspective and experience, now that I could focus again. Perhaps if I had not left home at 15 and began a life of drugs, vagrancy and street sex, who knows...I would have nothing to write about and I would end up writing for the Hallmark Channel!!! Now that would be a crime!

The Writer and the Orbital Alignment of Planetary Pharmaceuticals, Galactic Guns and Orgasmic Sex

Never an avid collector of guns, nor being a hunter, I do have a penchant for a good pistol, and recently along with the purchase of three new Chrome computers, I also added a Ruger SR9 semi-automatic pistol.

They don’t have semi-automatic keyboards, however, my keyboard is always on fully automatic anyway so it matters not. My Ruger can only hold 17 rounds at a time, where as my computer can crank out 2,500 words a day which is normal. Why a pistol? Simple! This is America and it’s a Larry McMurtry “Lonesome Dove” land of 9mm complexity. I enjoy target shooting and who knows if I’ll reach a point where words no longer flow and maybe Hemingway and Thompson had the right idea. Perhaps Alex and his Droogies try to break into my home with jumpsuits more suitable looking on house painters carrying walking sticks as weapons? Never take a knife to a gunfight. I may only be 5’ 7” but I recently gained 9 mm! I am locked and loaded!

All writers are not created equal. We have no Great Emancipator to proclamate for us, or to free us from the salacious slavery of the cotton fields of creativity. We are pathfinders, loners, solo beings who embrace the solitude that words bestow on us as we stow away on a ghost ship heading into the storms of Cape Horn. Bearing now east-north-east to tantalizing hashish Tangiers and it’s bordellos of forbidden sex where habitues flock to fuck in back alleys.

We, as writers, have trails we must blaze crazed through the haze and the maze ourselves in order to locate our literary compass.

Our mental state as writers is an underground railroad of experimentation and an exorcism of genre slavery and adherence to convention, so, indeed, substance can trump the proclivity of form that is injected into the literary junkie veins of lit students and English Majors, and instead promotes the promiscuity of the personal visions that are the perfectly aligned planets of the writers universe.

The maniacal machinations of the rogue writer can cause internal environMENTAL DAMAGE that can knock the writer on his ass, or off his axis melting his Polar Ice Caps if he is not careful. To find a balance, in my case, it is a simple equation of pharmaceuticals, guns and sex.

Writers and guns at first may seem to be strange bedfellows, a round jigsaw puzzle with the pieces all one color and simplistic in design on the surface, but that merely masks it’s complexity , it’s not geometric equations or the perspiration of a physics exam, concentric circles disguised as childish optical illusions, or even more childish Knock Knock jokes. Typewriters and firearms have a history of fornication with one another in the realm of literature. The machismo school of literati have always favored gunsmoke over white out, as McMurtry, Mailer, Hemingway, Thompson, and Burroughs have championed.

Death by typewriter or firearm by pistol packin' drunken writers is a literary affair of the macabre, that gives new meaning to the finish of a novel..THE END! It can approach the joys felt of winning the Pulitzer Prize for prose or poetry to the truly depressed and manic writer of words, and will manifest itself as a double-barreled legacy on the lost and found profound pedestal of profundity. We read, he heed, we memorize the mantra of depression experienced by our men and women of letters, only, or is it just me, it seems the lit-men off themselves in great numbers approaching a suicidal frenetic frenzy with fanatical frequency.

Hemingway suffered from depression, and self confessed loss of creativity. It was enough to grab his shotgun and blow off his cranium, once so full of bullfights in Spain and life on the ocean fishing for marlin. Once creativity is lost, all is lost to a writer. Hunter Thompson ended it all with a pistol in hand, not a shotgun, but going one step further had his ashes shot from a cannon in celebration in Colorado. Again, the pain was too much.

The fear, the loathing, where the buffalo roamed no more, the words were recycling themselves into a creative compost of leftovers. The only way out was not a million dollar advance from a publisher but a three cent bullet in a chamber, locked and loaded. It happens…..shit happens….nothing happens.

Hemingway suffered from depression, and self confessed loss of creativity. It was enough to grab his shotgun and blow off his cranium, once so full of bullfights in Spain and life on the ocean fishing for marlin. Once creativity is lost, all is lost to a writer. Hunter Thompson ended it all with a pistol in hand, not a shotgun, but going one step further had his ashes shot from a cannon in celebration in Colorado. Again, the pain was too much.

The fear, the loathing, where the buffalo roamed no more, the words were recycling themselves into a creative compost of leftovers. The only way out was not a million dollar advance from a publisher but a three cent bullet in a chamber, locked and loaded. It happens…..shit happens….nothing happens. Now I don’t worry, if the word flow stops flowing and growing, I have a 17 syllable semi-auto 9mm haiku to hang onto.

Writing as Stock Car Racing by Mike Marino

The sport that comes closest to the craft of writing is one that burns rubber and flexes it’s horse powered machine muscle in asphalt eating competition while wearing invisible heavy metal ballet slippers executing choreographed spin outs and rollovers due to a hopped up on the need for speed and oval track victory with a background that emerged from the bootlegging backwoods of the garden of NASCAR where the comparisons between racing and writing are as hauntingly similar as second cousins having sex in a Southern hayloft to a symphony of twang with a little bit of the old in and out put into action as the hillbilly banality of banjo music gently plucks out a tune about penis extending pick up trucks & three-legged dogs named Tripod as Lil’ Abner carefully does the Polanski Shuffle with 15 year old Ellie Ma while the writer pursues the art of writing for it’s stock car solitude and the self-sexual gratification of the mind as he opens the literary throttle and jams the creativity into gear and hopes for a fuel injected orgasm of prose as he cruises the inside track always trying to break 200 mph as the track officials try to impede indeed this proletarian practice of pushing the envelope to the outer limits of safety and sanity while the writer wants to excel and exceed the speed limits imposed on style and creativity as an outlaw breaking rules with a posse of apostrophe’s and unapologetic punctuation hot on his tail as he outruns and outguns the lawdogs of fine literature. The English Major!

The writer assumes his position (ok, insert “or her” after each “his” I’m doing the hard part here, so help me out eh?) at the controls of mo-sheen, determined to win the race at all costs. The god’s of NASCAR have their stock cars as modern day Roman chariots. The writer has his computer keyboard or his old school Remington electric typewriter, which today is regarded as a ‘32 Ford with a modified engine or to take it one step further, a 1952 Deee-troit Hudson Hornet with dual one-barrel carbs, which if equipped with factory modifications could crank out 210 HP.

Other writers competing for the same literary accolades also rev it up at the starting line hoping to cross the finish line by deadline and collect the check, the reviews and the groupies. Writing a magazine article or a simple blog post is one thing, but writing a novel is the absolute personification of the Indy 500 where endurance, as well as speed and skill come into play to be factored into the fiction or non fiction foreplay of the prism of the prose being posed and poised.

It’s time to separate the men from the boys and the girls from the women. Books and novels are not for the novice, this is the big league, the majors, the Catholic basilica of the Mother of Perpetual Motion where writing is an endurance contest, Lawrence crossing the desert to the sea, or Lucky Lindy landing in a field in France after his 1927 Trans Atlantic solo foray to foreign soil.

The writer also has a pit crew. Managers, agents, publishers and editors and a fair amount of literati groupies that follow the circuit. As the race is about to begin, the writer revs his engine and the words flow faster as the RPM’s generate a shake rattle and roll of the engine block. The keyboard is working at a furious pace, race fans run for more beer, words begin to fall to the page in a high octane mixture of imagery and language.

The machine needs maintenance during the rigorous torture of the internal competition he always feels while writing. This is where the pit crew comes into play racing to the pits to change the tires, check the fuel, the oil and myriad of other mechanical issues that may manifest itself in the manifold. It’s a jigsaw puzzle of a marvelous mechanical mosaic where all the pieces must function in a unique pattern of harmony as one, you know the old “planets are perfectly aligned” crap, or kosmic karma, as though the Dalai Lama were at the wheel of a Dodge Charger with a tank is full of high octane mysticism and proverbs. The editors edit, the publishers publish, the agents collect 10%, the readers read what the writers write, and the bookstores and art galleries hold book signing sessions to display their latest trophy head on the wall.

As you can see, writing is NASCAR and just as heroes of the track need a pit crew, so does the writer in search of a win. A writer as a pit crew to place comma’ in their proper pole position, check the word count level and make sure the machine meets all the requirements, all true, but when the race is over, the writer, as does the NASCAR action figure gets the check, the champagne and the GROUPIE!

Writing Survival and Camping it Up!

To survive in the wilderness, more than a than a mere modicum of survival skills are a prerequisite to success. How to tell direction without a compass, relying on the position of the sun and using the hands of a watch to determine the four basic points of direction. At night using the movement of the stars while utilizing a hiking stick as a surveyor’s instrument, and of course how to get a campfire ablaze to ward off the cold temps using one match and small ball of pine pitch.

Camping it up in a club featuring female impersonators is one thing, camping it up with a typewriter as an extension of the writing process is another. Of course you could pull an Ed Wood, Jr and wear angora sweaters while you camp it up writing and let your feminine side go fabulous, but, that is taking camping it up to a another dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound, but of sheer negligent negligee imagination, you have officially entered the transvestite Twilight Zone!

In this version of camping it up for writing survival, you need the proper gear before you step off into the wilds of literature. You need a typewriter, old school, similar to a rucksack versus and backpack, or a laptop so you can chart a course for the words to follow in unison to complete an obstacle course of cohesion to travel freely from the opening salvo of the first sentence to the logical “THE END” conclusion of your solo journey. Yes, writers drink to excess and get high so have your poison handy at all times to tide you over.

Pack light, but, make sure you have plenty of subject matter stashed away in the pockets of the mind. Dehydrated foods rehydrate, just as an old idea for a piece, long since shelved now enter the stream of consciousness, ready to rehydrate into a delicious meal to keep your body of works healthy for feasting upon. Nothing replenishes the spirit of the writer than a new path in familiar territory where once your vision was blocked by wooded thicket of brambles now presents a view of a Yosemite field of wildflower in the spring. As John Muir would say, “It’s a glorious feeling for the soul of man”. The same can be said for reviving a dormant idea, a literary Lazarus from the dead zone giving it new life. Soon it is complete and you can scream “It’s Alive! It’s Alive!”

Next you need to find where you are going to make camp and pitch your tent for the evening. A level ground for shelter with plenty of deadfall for firewood is perfect. The firewood is the fuel for the guts of the article. It may start slowly as you attempt the opening line, or “hook” but soon by adding more firewood, the twigs give way to small logs then becomes first an inferno then grows into a confusing conflagration of thought burning up the page, but, soon the flames subside into comfortable manageable embers. You need a diversity of firewood just as you need a diversity of subject matter. The firewood fuels the output and and the words are the sparks that dance upward on the draft to the sky at night mingling with the stars and planets that light up the imagination of writer and reader.

The piece is now almost complete. You’ve made it through the cold dark solo night without suffering from hypothermia, or writers block, and the rough draft is ready for the final assault. This is where you eliminate typos and insert punctuation to the best of your ability, don’t worry if you miss a few, that’s what editors are for. Mark Twain gave this sage advice for writers…” If you are at a loss for a word, use a vulgar word that is sure to offend, the editor will get rid of it and insert one for you that is proper”

Now you begin the re-writing process or in our scenario, dousing the fire and cleaning up the campsite, cleaning up the rough draft so it is presentable, this way you as a writer are now a conservationist leaving no trace you were ever there. You have scaled your own personal Everest.

Now you can open that bottle of booze and relax or as Hemingway said “Write when you are drunk….rewrite when you are sober". It is time to pack up your gear and head back now to civilization and when civilization once again becomes confining grab your backpack and your Angora sweater and camp it up!

Alter Ego’s and Other Campfire Songs

Writing is all about the survival of the fittest in the wild forest of words. Writers Blazing new trails, pathfinders armed with paragraphs and perhaps a pair of phrases...to paraphrase with or not to paraphrase with. That is eh question, but what the hell is the answer to finding your direction along the invisible lines of the creative compass with 360 individual increments to navigate and negotiate?

Writers survival mode includes always pushing forward down the river of no return, past failsafe, in a quest for subject matter to increase the impact on the reader as you, the writer expose yourself creatively dangling your participle precariously over the precipice.

A writer grows and evolves by taking the path least journeyed, searching for their own voice to rise above the cacophony of creativity that all writers collectively compose. This is where an individuals alter egos emerge as many sided schizoid voices of the mind to handle these personal individual divergent diversions into the realm of literary foreplay. That lone voice now becomes many and it’s time to call for the English Major as Exorcist. The many voices can be confusing to style so they must be separated and held in check, calling on them only when necessary or else Sunnybrook Farm becomes the Amityville Horror.

Some disguise themselves with that fancy sounding term, nom de plume such as Sam Clemens who marked time and twain as he regaled us with riverboats and superstitious boyhood tales of murder and superstition along the Mississippi all in the vernacular of the region reflecting the racism of the times as honestly as could be portrayed. Little known is that he had another pen name, Sieur Louis de Conte. Charles Dodgson took us down rabbit holes to Wonderland as Lewis Carroll. Mary Anne Evans who during Victorian times went by the nom de plume of George Elliott. She chose a masculine name for the simple reason of being taken seriously as an author. In those days, it was not yet David Bowie’s “Suffragette City” so you had to adapt or perish in a sea of unfinished novels.

I employ an army of alter ego inner mercenaries to create different experimental styles of writing in a constant effort to expand my horizons as opposed to Mike Marino, columnist and journalist. I have let the alter ego genii out of the bottle as Dr. Sandoz Diego Cerveza who writes the drug-junkie-wino-hooker street life stories although they are Mike Marino’s autobiographical forays into the dark side of life. Sandoz after the pharma developers of LSD, Diego for Rivera the artist and Cerveza, well BEER!

When I “go Canadian” I hired a cheap north of the border alter ego named Monty DeBauchery who writes about wet warm Canadian beaver in double entendre and about sexy Innuits, and the Down Unda Australian Arthur Burns to tackle to retrospective pieces of the daily life of a writer in the storm. I also use my alter ego Lefty Banks to write about socialist issues and the mysterious Green Leafy Lefty to write about marijuana legalization.

Alter egos allow me to escape the confines of Mike Marino to further delve deep into the murky uncharted waters unfettered by a singular writing style. It’s very similar in experience to busting a pinata wide open and watching word-candy fly about creating new patterns. The alter ego is the creative inner steroid that allows a writer to flex his or her literary muscle in fact when a writer only writes about one subject matter they become as exciting and predictable as a Dodge K Car, but when the alter ego takes over, diversity and style emerges as a supercharged Dodge Challenger.

Extreme Writers

In a world of extremes, weather, warfare, tempestuous romances and gender busting sex olympics, there is also the wide, wide world of sports. Forge American Gladiators, Tough Man Contests or Canadian Hockey with toothless types from the bowels of Toronto who have swallowed one to many pucks, ending upended looking for all the world as human Pez Puck Dispensers.

Now, I’m talking about the competitive edge all writers have, or should have. It’s like a sex drive. It’s hard to fuck without a hard-on and wordsmithing does just that to a writer. It is sex no matter how you view it.

Writers of prose are the prizefighters, yes, the gladiatorial warriors wielding typewriters as weapons in the ring. Throwing right hooks and southpaw blows, and some will hit below the belt.

Then you have the poets…Robert Frost, Emily Dickinsen, Walt Whitman..a poet placed in the ring with a prose prone punch drunk writer of fiction or non-fiction is no match in the category by the very nature of the craft..lyrical and song like about flowers and trees and love...no match for Mailer’s gritty “Naked Lunch” or anything by Bukowski with an empty bottle in hand. There are poet pugilists however, Langston Hughes, e.e. cummings, and Poe, whose subject and style would give a Faulkner a run for his prize money but beware, stepping into ring with Terry Southern or William Burroughs or Hunter S. Thompson.

Writers also duke it out with other writers, whether the competition be prose against prose or waxing poet versus waning poet. Hemingway turned against old friends who started to gain acclaim, Mailer would berate and belittle his peers as they too ascended the literary ladder of success.

The poets kind of keep to themselves however, and actually praise one another, and some writers, the confident ones that is, also praise opposing prose if appropriate.

Give them all a case of booze and watch it all fall apart...a fist fest of ferocity will have festered, and before you know it Vonnegut Hits Frost in the nuts. The writer of prose is now victorious but it is short lived...stepping into the ring is the poetic tag team of Shel Silverstein and Maya Angelou.

Even in the prose camp, or among campy prosers there is a certain literate bi-sexuality that drives them first to write a poem, then dabble and diddle with prose...this literary sex drive leads to the ego driven division within the ranks themselves in the literature food chain where novelists rule the realm followed by in no certain order, short story writers, magazine columnists, film art and music critics or reviewers, any Canadian writer, film treatment writers, made for TV film writers and of course at the very bottom...ad copy writers and the blogger blokes.

I for one welcome more talent in writing, as the more writers who make an impact there are on the planet...the better we all look in the eyes of the reader. We won’t all be Jack Londons or Steinbecks or Keats..and while we may compliment each other and truly admire their creative works...it’s still good to step into the ring to pummel the prose out of our compatriots for the sheer exercise...it only makes us stronger, or at the very least more determined and mainly..competition keeps us grounded so we have jus enough ego to get the job done in a readable fashion.

I for one enjoy the competition and the good natured jabs we take at each other because we may take our craft seriously...but we have to guard against taking OURSELVES too seriously. As Faulkner said….”Good Literature be damned….just let the words fall to the page and have fun with each other” ..as for writers...leave the boxing gloves and hockey sticks in the garage..roll a joint, open a bottle and just have fun with each other exploring the craft and hit a literary pinata instead and let the words fall to the page like candy and form sentences, paragraphs. stories or step into the ring as a critic and you’ll end up looking like a Canadian Hockey Puck Pez Dispenser...toothless in Toronto without a thesaurus to your name

First Books, First Sex

There are certain things in life that are beyond mere benchmark moments, but point of fact are defining moments that bend us, shape us, and mold us like clay sculptures making us a homogeneous mixture of perceptions as we intake and process events the propel us on our personal paths as homo sapiens acting internally and at times infernally as real crowd pleasers balancing on the unbalanced scales of personal illumination such as THE first fuck we ever experienced and how, no matter how many other women you’ve sweated up the sheets with she is and always will be indelibly carved into your memory banks, and no matter how talented that limber trapeze artist was in loosening up your libido in Detroit...that first fuck retains a holy halo of an untarnished unblemished angel while the other nameless names may fade, but, ”she” will always be there smiling as you try to re-capture that first euphoric Sophomoric monumental moment in time, a freeze framed emotion, a frozen dinner ready to heat up in the oven at a moments notice.

Next to fucking, reading is sexy to me, writing even sexier, almost ejaculatory in fact as orgasm is reached when the last period takes a bow and places itself on the page, end of the performance, SRO, applause applause.

So what can match your first fuck? The first book you’ve written? To me it was the first books I ever read as a child. The wonder of words and stories, and admittedly I started reading encyclopedias from A - Zed and was hungry for this knowledge as each page turned and revealed Parisian poets long forgotten, Austrian composers whose concertos are no longer heard,what a great bird the phoenix must have been had it existed, what hieroglyphs were and why and what, and why was the War of 1812 called the War of 1812 and why wasn’t World War One called the War of 1914?

By the age of eight I realized some books had stories and tales to tell. Being raised by my grandparents, avid readers themselves, I had access to books of my grandfathers Tom Swift Collection of real “boy” adventures in airships and radio electronics and all manner of other damned near Menlo Park electro-wizardry today we only acknowledge with a yawn. But I didn’t yawn at these yarns...I wanted more, I was an adventure junkie, addicted, an young wino lying face down in a gutter of literature and old grandpa was my pusher supplying me with the lit fix a junkie requires..Tom Sawyer and secret caves,, Huck Finn and riverboat pirates, and a series called The Young Voyageur which probably did more to feed my wanderlust that I have been blessed and cursed with all my life. It was a series of stories of a young boy in a birch bark canoe traveling Indian lands in the Great Lakes where I was living...he had amazing adventures on Lake Huron where I spent my summers..soon I became him and played out his adventures on Grand Lake and it’s many islands and I even spoke in the worst French accent imaginable, but I still save the damsel in distress and could portage a canoe with the grizzliest of trappers and mountain men.

I soon graduated to Jack London and his West Coast books of tales of sea wolves and storms and I became a pirate now and soon became a tattooed Queequeq searching for Moby Dick with one legged Ahabs, while enjoying the pages of Sinbad’s travels and travails, while Jules Verne launched me in a rocket to the moon and then back to earth to begin my travels to fight and defeat the mighty H G Wells Morlocks in moral time machine combat. he books were pounding into me with the force of a Pacific Ocean rogue wave...then along came Tolkien and Kerouac...hobbits are habit forming on the road..Then Burgess and his bears looking for honey and Vonnegut’s flashback time travels...travel, adventure, freedom … books led me on my own path of travel and adventure and I can only blame the written word, or thank the written word for a life that can only be described as a pedal to the metal rush...as for that first fuck? I can still remember it as though it were yesterday in a small meadow on the secluded shores of the Detroit River ….Thanks Debbie...

Can Music Soothe the Savage Writer? Damn You Tom Jones!

The writing process for me involves a psychological inner psyche psyched out and up hypodermic needle full of an amusing music narcotic injected straight into the brain, by-passing all pharmacological routes to reach narco nirvana where fission and fusion implode, explode, deplode, replode and other “plodes” that may be prudently and plodently possible as I plod and plode impossibly along the impassable yellow brick road of writers block to my final destination of conquest and completion of a writing project when putting punk punctuation (punkchewation) and words to paper, real or digital, the digital of which I refer is “imagined papier” which is somewhat and somehow is papier mache machismo of an attempt to hi-jack the French spelling in a failed attempt at appearing more literate than I am in a literal sense but, French always makes everything sound better, classier, like Latin or some lost language you only hear in films about murders in Tangiers in blood soaked fez-head kaftan infested back-alleys hiding all teh writers in the dark, dank shadows until they are freed to inject “foreign” words every now and then to class up the written piece of ass literature, unlike some of us who, oh yes, enjoy a great piece of ass but don’t use foreign words often because I usually can’t spell them and most times they are not appropriate but can be as summed up by King Louis the IV (I V? The Intravenous?) King Louie the Intravenous said “When I want to speak to learned men, I speak in Latin. When I want to speak to a woman of love I speak in French. When I want to talk to my horse, I use German!” Achtung Mr Ed! None of this has squat to do with music and the writing process.

Some writers function best in an audio vacuum, while some writers will go full tilt boogie with Stravinsky strings or a muddled mudhole of Mozart for that classical lilt to drive the drivel to the page. Others prefer the nuances of nuevo New Age mysterioso shit-synth cloudburst ocean with crashing birds aflight and on the wing above an arboreal forest productions. Others prefer karma producing Om chants with sitars instead of guitars. Some may even prefer the jarring Tom Jones tunes for a mincing touch of lounge lizard familiarity.

I have different moods for different projects. For example Chicago blues for those dangerous noir pieces full of hookers and junkies and wino’s who have passed through my life faster than a bullet through JFK’s head in a limo by Lincoln in Dealy Plaza in Dallas.

For pop pieces such as Banksy, provos, beats, etc I set the volume to stun with Ramones or New York Dolls or Flamin’ Groovies making my ears bleed and the music is as driving a force as nitro on the TV Tommy Ivo dragstrip so I can race along at rubber burning speed to the finish line and the final period. I tend to view writing as menstruation anyway so when my piece is complete I tell myself it’s that time of the month..to make deadline for publishers..so period placement is everything. Then I get my check from the publisher...for me that is merely a monetary Tampon.

I don’t like listen to lyric laden heavy hitters such as Bob Dylan, Doors, Mama’s and Papa’s to name a few as the imagery tends to drip and leave streaks on my literary canvas, colors run together and obscure my original impression of the piece I am working on. Worse, it tends to change the course and direction I have charted on my cerebral topo map, but then again, sometimes that derailment leads to a more interesting place and piece.

Some groups fit the grit-o-meter I strive for in my writing. Led Zep, Yardbirds, Cream, Deep Purple but when I downshift I switch to Traffic, Blind Faith and Terry Reid. Music is actually a gearshift for the writer and puts him or her into overdrive to negotiate the switchback roads or full throttle out on the straight-a-way to clear Omaha by midnight. For the pre-write thinking process where I like to carve out the outline mentally (remember someone once said, and I can’t remember who, “when a writer is staring blankly out of a window..he or she is writing!”I find Procol Harem the best in the west for blazing a trail in my head before I put the Ramones to work as i picture myself pumping punk rocker Sheena under the literary bleachers. Then I light a cigarette while I imagine her getting ready for round number two before I put one word to paper, or papier. Writers use music as a tool, a crutch some may say just as some of us have to wear a certain shirt (my grey-red plaid in my case or pants (ragged old chinos) or shoes (barefoot) proving we are a superstitious lot who still believe that voodoo curses are responsible for writers block and hangovers and early ejaculation.

So this is the end of this piece, my only friend the end...never guess what I’m listening too eh?

The Manifestation and Metamorphosis of The American Music Maelstrom

It ain’t all pretty punk and garage grunge and rock and roll as American music has undergone more change in the evolution of recorded genre’s from early fiddle folk tunes of the early Euro-Ethnic influence to hillbilly banjo and jug bands with a side order of ragtime and blues and jukin’ jism jazz to the Sinatra/Dorsey big bands to Bob Wills fusing different sounds and styles by infusing country western with Tommy Duncan big band vocals and adding drums while Ernest Tubb amplified his guitar and Hank Williams from high atop the mansion on the hill twanged his tunes to a blue moon while the deep fried southern delta unleashed sharecropper beats that found their way up north from Highway 61 to the jukeboxes of Butterfield's Chicago and while hillbilly’s became rockabilly’s in Memphis, Sun Records began to rise on the hot 100 lost horizons watching careful as the wax of Stax Records played a checkmate game with the wizards of Chess Records and rock and roll shot from the studio womb like a hound dog with great balls of fire and jumpin' jukes were firing head shots from a full metal jacket of rhythm blues, and jazz deep into the very souls and depths of white American youth, as Negro race music grabbed us by the balls, and somehow it got all mixed up happily so with a pinch of backwoods rock-a-hillbilly, a dash of swing, and badda boom, badda bing, it was time to give birth to the bastard child of inbred musical parentage known as Rock N Roll, Baaaaby where 45 rpm's gave you three plays for a quarter, and the beat goes down to the juke joint where you go in, as the music launched like a rocket and was about to break the Tin Pan Alley sound barrier because it was now all about splitting the musical atom releasing electric energy and rivers of sweat, harnessed and then unleashed in an explosion with Little Richard, resplendent, regal, raucous and downright rock 'n roll ravenous, bangin' the 88's and screaming across the sky like some flamboyant out of control, off the path meteor shower laughing as Chuck Berry, with no particular place to go, still searched high and low for Marie, still lost in Memphis as musical cattle drive got underway from Lubbock, Texas, as Peggy Sue's bespeckled, horn rimmed musical boyfriend, gave us heaping platefuls of our buddy, Holly's famous American Pie, until the plate fell with a crash from the table and landed with a deafening silence in a cornfield one cold, below zero Iowa night while Memphis, too, was beginning to go into musical orbit with Beale Street blues cats and rockabilly strays circling the Sam Phillips Memphis Sun like planets in perfect synchronicity, while blue suede shoes tapped to a hillbilly beat as the rock and roll syringe was laced with it's boom boom beat narcotic and was looking for veins in the 50’s that fanned the 60’s flames of protest that said, Folk You while we went surfin’ in the USA until Brian Wilson beached himself and lay dormant so that disco had us spinning like a reflective ball with a dance beat and polyester in heat while in the back alley’s the Ramones moaned with a punk named Sheena and the Groovies were Flamin’ with their second cousin and the New York Dolls danced with jet boys, and all the while synthesizers waited in the digital darkness and today, punk polka psychedelia is back minus the balls of Louie, Louie down by that dirty water in the Boston garage.

Writers Block

Early morning, dark word clouds rolling in as the wrtier alone solitary sits alone in Chicago, the dark black-thick clouds overhead would be a deep blue, like the dark in an underground cavern, or the dank cigarette stale beer interior of some Bukowski saloon with hustlers and pimps and faded hookers and lost dreams and worst of all WRITERS BLOCK as the writer is hands on hans solo with only the jukebox standing lonely in the wee small hours of the morning corner, forgotten it’s promise of three plays for a quarter, a cheap street whore to say the least at that price, the kind with needle tracks up and down her arm, greenish hue with bruises and a shot of whiskey with a syphilis chaser and together, they all sit…stony silence until someone, probably from Cincinnati jams a quarter into the juke…the ancient 45 rpm takes it’s place on the spindle, while the needle takes it’s place in it’s waiting groove, moving gently caressingly and almost lovingly, more black vinyl foreplay then anything else…it reaches guitar orgasm and explodes in ecstasy…the mojo goes east-west, and keeps on moving, gyrating actually, in it’s own dream, not shared, the dream is a Butterfield erection, blues from the alley straight to the soul like a junkie jamming needle for a quick fix…Pigboy closes his eyes..enjoys the rush….Paul Butterfield Blues gently making love to a dark and rainy Sunday morning fuel injecting the writers typewriter to write right and rightly so, barflys and barkeeps, stale cigs in an ashtray, the music infuses the soul of the writer ..narcolepsy, necromancy, nothing fancy..just sex with the grateful dead…the writer smiles now…it’s a dark blue black morning, with a full mind sky of blues sunshine, and what the fuck, he got his blues on and his rocks off but the words are elusive and the muse amuses not infuses as it knows writing is a fully loaded hypodermic needle full of junkie juice words and pharmacological illogically logical Bill Burroughs phrases while eating lunch naked with a Steely Dan in hand, that when injected onto paper, number 10 bond or zero bond digital from the machine gun burp burp burp of a Bukowski typewriter or a writer of type & typo, hype & hypo on a doc of word can be a finely honed blues song from the Robert Johnson Delta or Paul Butterfield Chicago that can hijack a reader into another world of fantasy or reality as fantasy or fantasy as reality just as fantastic and as real as unreal Alice tumbling down a dark rabbit hole or feasting on a steady diet of the Warren Commission findings on the killing of JFK which only confused the conspirators and addicts alike for more narco theories along with the journalistic mumbo jumbo of who, what, why and where of grassy knolls and Italian rifles that is no longer practiced practically anywhere nor at any time except in private; a ceremony of self abusive gratification, masturbation and elated ejaculation where cumming is going and the cock in hand is worth two in her bush but is going nowhere fast but let the words not fall from the pinata and spill to the ground to form sentient literary beings that morph and giggle and wiggle and jiggle like large tits on a girl on a juicy tilt a whirl at a carnal carnival during Carnaval in Rio so grand as they take the form of sentences which are then school yard bullied into paragraphs to paraphrase and prose amazingly Grace during a menopause or womanopause where men and women pause to read between the snow white lines of cocaine on the table and powder their noses in the ladies room where there is no room just stalls like stables for horses, and toilets that shoot bidet water up ones ass in a spray of exotic sexuality that opens the back door for enjoyment and enlightenment where even Li Po can get his doggy style rocks off in a zen rush in her one hand clapping clap trap parting of her red seas of menstruation where few dare to tread when the vagina is red, but, many will trek especially writers as it is a novel idea this journey into the dark cave that time of the month, but soon the river of red dries up as do the writers words and it is caused not by a tampon, but, by writers block or a limp cock as neither will give it up anymore, for a little while anyway, and anyway there is Midol for cramps and booze and pills in a rainbow assortment of side effects especially destined for literary types, but, when creative constipation blocks the page there is only one thing to do and the writer must give himself, herself or itself an enema just as the opium addicted narco freaks must do to regulate the system as writing is a system or a non-system depending on how the art form is artfully approached carefully and dutifully to fullfill the creative cravings of the artist to articulate in a field of fact or fiction within warring factions of mathematics by mathematicians who invert and magicians who exert now you see it now you don’t distractions by creating fractions simply by the act of sawing a woman in one half, top and bottom depending on whether you desire her mind or her body when the words dry up like the Colorado River in the high heat of August and the canyons reach 110 degrees the heat leaving behind dead white out paper and a better read than dead dread that all writers dread even the Hunter named Thompson who searched every genre unlocking the secrets of gonzo and ganja gleaning much meaning from old Bill Burroughs who could add things up and lay them out in literary furrows while giving false directions to a home where the buffalo roam until Thomas Wolfe began exclaiming without an ounce of perversion or even complaining, that the direction you go in search of an erection, you can look homeward for a Hunter Thompson Hell's Angel, but even they can't go home again home again home again homeward bound, or bound and gagged at home with a spiked heeled vixen who has you chained and tied to take a lickin' until you escape with Old Bill Burroughs who was insanely logical, and pharmacological, that he would call for egg rolls and soup with a large take out box of Ferlingetti's chinese spaghetti then would grab Corso by the torso and Ginsberg by the balls who cried out with delighted howls that were so piercing and loud that even Helen Keller could hear them above the din of the crowd as she felt her way to the chair where they sat down with Truman the True-man and Bill shot a question at him from a loaded chamber, "I have to know truly, Capote with all your whining and gripping why you say that Kerouac couldn't write, he was just typing" which sounds queer coming from you such a phrase spoken in such cold blood, why, your words flow like a torrent, a devastating cynical flood, I say we head out with Kesey and a wolf named Tom, drink our Kool-aid and get fucking bombed then we can find F. Scott and drunken Zelda and be on an equal footing with them as we search for the Hilton Hotel, James which is nowhere near the River Thames, but, high on a plain in Spain, where the Shah p'shawed Bernard in the Himalayas that was as far as the Lost Generation will go to find that paradise found was really a new chapter called paradise lost, lost in a crap game in a back alley in raving Bukowski bar alley's and in Jack and Neal's Mexico and in old Bills Old Tangier only to find that they had lost the last pair 'a dice in Paradise Lost, where they were left them on the grey dirt side or maybe the red dirt side, never sure anymore quoth the raving as it became more confusing as they lost the map of the path, drinking too much of Steinbeck’s grapes of wrath until Old Burroughs jammed a spike deep into his arm and thought he heard a church bell ring out an alarm when just then old dyke Stein ran into the room screaming without aplomb that everyone was dead on the floor of her left banke saloon, she cried out in pain to the 23 skidoo flappers that the bell was the result of Hemingway playing with his clappers, "I've answered that damn bell in the wee small hours since a quarter to three, this time dear Alice, it tolls for thee" But Corso ran to answer the bell as he heard someone say "you’re a stupid ass sucker" and turning his head he saw it was that drunken mother fucker, who answered to the name of Bill too but was a real Mother Faulkner who was heading for the bordello with another writer fellow, a Southern named Terry, who was looking for a 14 year old to pop her cherry as he had done it before with a piece of ass he found when he stepped through Lewis Carroll’s looking glass and Oscar went Wilde when he found Kubrick fondling in the next room playing and toying with Nabokov's Lolita's womb...everyone by now was a high as Mr. Kite who could soar and fly like Roger the Byrd, eight miles high writing songs to be heard, as Burgess became alarmed at how high Roger was flying while the Dead and the Beatles, songwriters all were dying, so he adjusted his ascot sarcastically and said "I can't fly or even sing, if the good lord had wanted Paul McCartney to fly he would have given him Wings" but songwriters, playwriters, prose writers and poets, suffer greatly in pain from Rimbaud the intellectual to the madcap Twain and know it, not to mention Shelley and Byron who could put down words and nail her but then again sometimes too were left naked and dead killed by Mailer who escaped on a horse he had named Sailor and headed for the canyons to escape through the Pass of dos Passos to his hideway in New York twirling his lasso's hoping his tell tale heart would lead him to the land of Poe who wrote devastatingly slow, but in the end he did the job, while serving of helpings of corn on macabre for Ellery Queen and Stephen King who cajoled Cujo to chase them in a circle while all the time it was recorded by Studs Terkel who rushed his copy to the newspaper but was tired and out of condition hoping like hell to make the front page of the early edition so that he could be better read then dead before Shelley woke up the undead to walk the earth as a living nightmare while Bradbury headed out into space with skills finely honed and ben fong torres was piloting the Jefferson Airplane while captain of Rolling Stone and all the new writers and poets clamor for attention and praise, hoping to make a quick buck by turning a clever phrase while dancers are naked and attend to the guests for debauchery that is now the writers true quest as he writes words on paper in hopes of getting paid but if not he or she will settle merely to get laid, it's not about profit said the prophet it's all about art, the words must call from your soul and your heart and scream from the voice within before the words wither and get sickly thin so regard the page as your customer with a wad full of cash you as a writer are a hooker with a stash so smoke your words and inject your prepositions preposterously into a vein and crack them open like eggs...and remember also to spread you legs as you remember dear writer you are the keeper of lore, but in reality you're merely a whore, after all we do get paid by the piece!

Writers on the Storm

He was a Hunter named Thompson who searched every genre unlocking the secrets of gonzo and ganja gleaning much meaning from old Bill Burroughs who could add things up and lay them out in literary furrows while giving false directions to a home where the buffalo roam until Thomas Wolfe began exclaiming without an ounce of perversion or even complaining, that the direction you go in search of an erection, you can look homeward for a Thompson Hells Angel, but even they can't go home again home again home again homeward bound, or bound and gagged at home with a spiked heeled vixen who has you chained and tied to take a lickin' until you escape with Old Bill Burroughs who was insanely logical, and pharmacological, that he would call for eggrolls and soup with a large take out box of Ferlingetti's chinese spaghetti then would grab Corso by the torso and Ginsberg by the balls who cried out with delighted howls that were so piercing and loud that even Helen Keller could hear them above the din of the crowd as she felt her way to the chair where they sat down with Truman the True-man and Bill shot a question at him from a loaded chamber, "I have to know truly, Capote with all yor whining and gripping why you say that Kerouac couldn't write, he was just typing" which sounds queer coming from you such a phrase spoken in such cold blood, why, your words flow like a torrent, a devastaing cynical flood, I say we head out with Kesey and a wolf named Tom, drink our Kool-aid and get fucking bombed then we can find F. Scott and drunken Zelda and be on an equal footing with them as we search for the Hilton Hotel, James which is nowhere near the River Thames, but, high on a plain in Spain, where the Shah p'shawed Bernard in the Himalayas that was as far as the Lost Generation will go to find that paradise found was really a new chapter called paradise lost, lost in a crap game in a back alley in raving Bukowski bar alley's and in Jack and Neals Mexico and in old Bills Old Tangier only to find that they had lost the last pair 'a dice in Paradise Lost, where they were left them on the grey dirt side or maybe the red dirt side, never sure anymore quoth the raving as it became more confusing as they lost the map of the path, drinking too much of Steinbecks grapes of wrath until Old Burroughs jammed a spike deep into his arm and thought he heard a church bell ring out an alarm when just then old dyke Stein ran into the room screaming without aplomb that everyone was dead on the floor of her left banke saloon, she cried out in pain to the 23 skidoo flappers that the bell was the result of Hemingway playing with his clappers, "I've answered that damn bell in the wee small hours since a quarter to three, this time dear Alice, it tolls for thee" But Corso ran to answer the bell as he heard someone say "your a stupid ass sucker" and turning his head he saw it was that drunken mother fucker, who answered to the name of Bill too but was a real Mother Faulkner who was heading for the bordello with another writer fellow, a Southern named Terry, who was looking for a 14 year old to pop her cherry as he had done it before with a piece of ass he found when he stepped through Lewis Carrols looking glass and Oscar went Wilde when he found Kubrick fondling in the next room playing and toying with Nabokov's Lolita's womb...everyone by now was a high as Mr. Kite who could soar and fly like Roger the Byrd, eight miles high writing songs to be heard, as Burgess became alarmed at how high Roger was flying while the Dead and the Beatles, songwriters all were dying, so he adjusted his ascot sarcastically and said "I can't fly or even sing, if the good lord had wanted Paul McCartney to fly he would have given him Wings" but songwriters, playwriters, prose writers and poets, suffer greatly in pain from Rimbaud the intellectual to the madcap Twain and know it, not to mention Shelley and Byron who could put down words and nail her but then again sometimes too were left naked and dead killed by Mailer who escaped on a horse he had named Sailor and headed for the canyons to escape through the Pass of dos Passos to his hideway in New York twirling his lasso's hoping his tell tale heart would lead him to the land of Poe who wrote devastatingly slow, but in the end he did the job, while serving of helpings of corn on macabre for Ellery Queen and Stephen King who cajoled Cujo to chase them in a circle while all the time it was recorded by Studs Terkel who rushed his copy to the newspaper but was tired and out of condition hoping like hell to make the front page of the early edition so that he could be better read then dead before Shelley woke up the undead to walk the earth as a living nightmare while Bradbury headed out into space with skills finely honed and ben fong torres was piloting the Jefferson Airplane while captain of Rolling Stone and all the new writers and poets clamor for attention and praise, hoping to make a quick buck by turning a clever phrase while dancers are naked and attend to the guests for debauchery that is now the writers true quest as he writes words on paper in hopes of getting paid but if not he or she will settle merely to get laid, it's not about profit said the prophet it's all about art, the words must call from your soul and your heart and scream from the voice within before the words wither and get sickly thin so regard the page as your customer with a wad full of cash you as a writer are a hooker with a stash so smoke your words and inject your prepositions preposterously into a vein and crack them open like eggs...and remember also to spread you legs as you remember dear writer you are the keeper of lore, but in reality you're merely a whore, afterall we do get paid by the piece!

Why Do Writers Commit Suicide? To Get to the Other Side

Death by typewriter or shotgun by pistol packin' drunken writers is a literary affair of the macabre, that gives new meaning to the finish of a novel..THE END! It can approach the joys felt of winning the Pulitizer Prize for prose or poetry to the truly depressed and mania driven writer of words, and will manifest itself as a double-barreled legacy on the lost and found profound pedestal of profundity. We read, he heed, we memorize the mantra of depression experienced by our men and women of letters, only, or is it just me, it seems the lit-men off themselves in greater numbers approaching a suicidal frenetic frenzy with more frequency then our female counter parts. Also, male writers seem to have an ongoing love affair and battle with a bottle of booze handy by the typewriter to offset the pain of the blank page as it sits staring with blank eyes back at it's creator who is not very creative at times. The writer blames the paper for it's thin viscosity and tosses it in the trash. The writer knows in advance of this malady, elsewise why have a trashcan at his side at the ready anyway? It's called literary limitation and it's demon is that of depression. The great depression of the great gatsby kind.

Hemmignway suffered from depression, and self confessed loss of creativity. It was enough to grab his shotgun and blow off his cranium, once so full of bullfights in Spain and life on the ocean fishing for marlin. Once creativity is lost, all is lost to a writer. Hunter Thompson ended it all with a pistol in hand, not a shotgun, but going one step further had his ashes shot from a cannon in celebration in Colorado. Again, the pain was too much. The fear, the loathing, where the buffalo roamed no more, the words were recycling themselves into a creative compost of leftovers. The only way out was not a million dollar advance from a publisher but a three cent bullet in a chamber, locked and loaded. Not all writers commit suicide.

The blank paper is the receptical of the writers ideas, thoughts, emotions, but when sentence structure is hindered by kindred handicaps that result in syntax submerged in an ocean of obscure thought, and prose and poetry relegated to a dumpster in the writers alley of junkies and drunks who offer no help, nor resistance, nor assistance of any kind but stay hidden in dark corners behind wet boxes used by the homeless to escape the cold fo the city night much as the writers thoughts and perfect synchronization and flow of idea in mind to sentence on paper to paragraphs on the page of page one of the nouvelle novel become lost, homeless and addicted to the bondage of number 10 bonded paper and bonded booze with a twist off cap that relieves the pain of creative disfunction but cannot fill in the gaps of the creative potholes left on the page as the writer falls down on the job with paragraph paranoia and the demons of bad punctuation and sentence structure so weak the building process will cause the story to crumble like old architecture on a fault line...

Now just suppose that when you juxtapose your pinata of poetry and prose it doesn't have three dimensions but four dementias A writer begins a sentence,a project as though he is intering a village unknown, not on the maps, Holographic mandalas appear as he sees young zen cheerleaders in revealing skirts of catholic plaid, along with visions of other writers and poets and writing hipsters spinning out of orbit with a post-beat cadence, swimming and sailing as great Ahab whaling ships in search of a novel, a story, a great white whale in a kaliedescopic sea of murals filled with mermaids. Beastly large frescoes, obscenely obese as magneto generators deep inside the creative vagina.

The writer opens the bottle for another drink. The minds eye tries in vain to see the story, waiting for it to unfold, yet at first, blockage, it only can see the dialated vacant alley eye socket stares of the insitutional disabled and tries to eavesdrop on those silent screaming voices in the head of characters so he can give them life and form and add them to the page of words. He, the writer, like the non-fiction and fictional victims imprisoned in wheelchairs, straightjackets and hopped up on narco midnight pills while interjecting injections of sweet dreamy morphine. Drugs and alcohol inducing calm, allowing the writer to circumnavigate his own private Polar Ice Caps, past giant icebergs, round and round the Cape we go, circular storyline explorations they are, easy to negotiate, except for those 90 degree corners of fleeting reality that appeared only as more hallucinations obscuring what they really were. Those recesses, the corners, the 90 degree forks in the literary road, are illuminated in deep shadow by electric currents, pulsating and twitching in orgasmic release it themselves to the grand nerve central station, exposing the masks of drunkards with tankards, comedians and dexadrinians.

The broken mirror in the men's room fires back olfactory warning shots over the head and a pile of neon lipstick tubes lie in the bottom of an empty William Holden swimming pool complete with completed screenplay about Sunset Boulevard. The story finally makes itself known, and ready for the writers hacksaw to cut it to size, as he becomes William Burroughs and Humphrey Bogart, with visions of bright lights emanating from a very secretive Left Bank French underground, thick with homosexual transexual mascara that penetrated deep into the bowels of the cabaret underworld of a bereft Berlin. A socialista workers paradise appeared in it's glitzy place, forewarning of a possible fornication as he sat down on the floor of the bar to watch Tom Joad and the False Maria getting it on, electing eventually to erect monsterous and preposterous monuments to The Lost Generation writers.

Writing as Hemmingway said can be like blasting though rocks to make a tunnel through the mountains....while writers like Hemmingway and Thompson opted to off themselves, writers like Burroughs reached for his pile of pills, and with his loaded brain of Traffic's Medicated Goo chased his own demons onto the page and ate them naked for lunch...oh give me home where the buffalo...and the literary roam and answers the question, for whom does the literary bell toll..it tolls for thee, we, and me...now you know the truth...and the answer...why did the writer commit suicide? To get to the other side!

Testesterone and The Typodermic Needle

Typos and Hypos, hippies and hipsters...we all make mistakes when it comes to placing words to paper, digital or real, and we have become addicts now...injecting ourselves with typodermic needles filled with the narcotic of word counts and spell checks...never mind a Webster dictionary that is as thick as a Jethro Tull brick and can actually be used as a weapon in the proper hands, let alone a writers right arm with pronounciations, exclamatory proclamations, punctuations, comma's and exclamations, derivatives of words from Latin to far off far out Phoenician when a symbol of a hawk was a whole sentence to spelunked cave drawings that told a tale similar in form to comic strips in the newspaper in the language of the Great Literary Neanderthal Hemingways..tales of the hunt..the wheel ... and fire.

Remember when you used a typewriter and your best friend was a bottle of White Out? Misspellings ocurred but didn't matter as you had your trusty bottle of white liquid magic that hid the typo from prying eyes. Not completely of course as it's image was always there..dim, fading, hiding under the new layer of black ink from the ribbon...not completely erased...a veritible Shroud of Turin. If White Out wouldn't work there was always the rubber eraser...a rubber is always considered protection under any circumstances be it sexual or literary. Today that prophylactic protection is a thing of the past and we like to ride bareback but there is the delete button always ready, locked and loaded, and armed and aimed at the enemy...the proverbial typo...the mistake...the wrong key hit...the right key missed...the writer now pissed...two questions..how do you mispell a cave symbol...second..how do you correct it? Just scratch it out with stone...start all over again...in effect igneous rocks and granite stones were the "delete" button of yore...or in Typo..."your"..the typo temptress rushes us along...catches us off guard...kicks us in the balls..or in the vagina. Lucky for you it's recessed...balls are sitting ducks as targets...I'll trade for a vagina anyday...for a lot of reasons...never mind...don't go there..unless I had a vagina..then please..go there!

It's not just hitting the wrong keys that makes for a typofest in a writers works...it's the words..the spellings themselves...that brings us back to cave writing ...an animal running with horns and a spear thrown...the hunt is on...period...no other way to say it...but take our English Language...please! Ok, sorry, Henny Youngman just raced through my brain momentarily, only stopping to take a pee then went on his merry way...words..too many ways to spell them..here...not make that there.."there"..."their" ..."they're"...then of course the various bastardizing versions..from the hillbilly mind comes "thar" as it does also from the nautical sea dog..the whaler...the pirate..."Thar she blows"...what the hell does that mean...they found Linda Lovelace on her knees? Of course she blows...and thar she be looking for Moby Dick...I'm changing my name to Moby just for that....

Punctuation is confusing..when do you insert your exclamation point into someones semi-colon...some people have whole colons..and of course many don't like to insert it if a sentence is having a period...but many of us also don't mind at all..you just have to know if it's that time of the literary month...then Tampons usually replace exclamation points for a short while so don't get your adverbs in a bunch or your adjectives in an uproar you'll (yule, Yul as in Bryner, you all, ya'll) period or not you can feast at the court of the Crimson Queen while injoying a Tampon popsicle.

Word count so count your words with a word count program...check your spelling with spell check but don't check your spelling at the door...and for god sake..don't text...the ultimate rape of the English language is text...I told a friend, a fellow writer who, like me, writes at a furious pace and we leave in our literary wake...a rather large body count of typos in our wake...we actually pride ourselves, subconciously on who can outdo the other in sheer numbers of dead words littered on the battlefield..broken and bleeding words, dying, last gasp and breath..unless...the medics arrive in time with their bag of tricks and vials of the drug Spell Check...Speed Kills..Spell Saves...the typodermic needle is filled with the litquid...yes, literature and liquid..not a typo this time around...litquid..and it is injected into the article or chapter or blog and the whole piece feels peace and inner contentment...the junkie got his fix...the English majors can now jack off to honor a writers perfection..no words misspelled...life is grand once again. Editors can relax...they usually fix things anyway...look at Kerouac...half of On The Road was edited down by his publisher and punctuation filled in like potholes on a city street.

I have not done a spell check on this...I don't care to do that...so have yourself a treasure hunt and find them..little pearls where I have fucked up...English majors and editors love to engage in that pastime...not seeing the forest for the trees..and smugly pointing out the mistakes....blinded by the light..do wah diddy diddy...I've always said...Editors are why God created writers..the clean up all the technical crap and dung we leave in our path...or like NASCAR..the writer is the driver..but every writer, like every driver in a race needs a pit crew...to change the tires, check the spelling, re-fuel the machine, check under the hood for punctuation and grammer..and then send the driver back to the track..but in the end...it's the writer that gets the girl and the champagne!

Now...Textesterone: Save the Words, the Whales Can Wait! It's a sad state of affairs when testesterone is replaced by textesterone. There is texting competition and feats of strength on the digital battlefield of language honor. When typing was in full fashion and vogue, you had to use 10 fingers and whip out 85 wpm. Today it's a two thumb proposition that allows for not only speed but coded wording that is at once as unfathomable to the average person from Gary, Indiana trying to make heads or tails while attempting in vain to decipher the Rosetta Stone in their leisure spare time after a bowling tournament.

Ancient symbols once sufficed sufficiently as tall tales and legendary mythology on cave walls or parchment scrolls. These symbols of birds and animals and infinity were soon replaced by "language" ..perhaps a grunt and a groan here and there to acknowlede a good meal or a terrific piece of cavewoman ass. They still haven't seen any displays of carnal carvings on cave walls to describe how man and woman first discovered the fire of passion, let alone flame for the campfire, the wheel or where and why to insert the male organ into the female receptical.

In time language emerged as words, but learned men, not unlearned men, not women, yet...it was that period of time when if you had a period you could not read nor write to add a period to the end of a sentence. It was all printed out by hand, in pen or what passed for a pen in those ancient times, until a man named Guttenberg made type movable and the world learned the art of books and bindings. These were eventually placed in places of learning..and great libraries were built in Greece, Rome and a collosal one in Rhodes!

The words were soon shared with the "gasp!" public as they learned to read about art, history, and most threatening of all to any government..new ideas...words made you think...to absorb ...to want to learn more. The slaves brought over from Africa to this continent were forbidden to be allowed to learn to read...reading promotes ideas...just ask the British Empire and their hatred for Thomas Paine's "Common Sense" or Karl Marx and "Das Capital" or worse, "Mein Kampf" by Adolf Hitler. Man and Superman on a rocket ride to power.

Words were literature for centuries..Chaucer, Dickens, Wells, Fitzgerald, Thompson, Kesey and the list goes on...until literature was kidnapped for the mass media...words like Kleenex, horribly Madison Avenued became standard...Xerox..another manufactured assemblyline word...Kodak moments..not Kodiak Bear Moments....you no longer asked for a copy of anything...gimme a xerox you would say as easily as ordering a slurpee at a 7/11 in your best broken English so the Pakistani behind the counter will understand your desire to quench your thirst in the American landscape of the language tower of Babel that is multiculturalism.

Then along came Texting Tex...Texarkana...Texas...Texmex...TEXT! We have now not only kidnapped the poetry and prose of the English language designed to delight, amaze and educate, but we have raped it and reduced it to the status of hapless victim. We no longer stand in awe of language, but curse it, defile it, destroy it, reduce it to ashes, tear it into small digestible pieces and stomp it into the ground under the bootheel of ignorance and growing illiteracy...leading us headlong on the path the a world where the temperature will be a steady 411 Farenheit.

Don't drink and drive...today jsut as bad, there are texting manslaughter mauraders behind the wheel of the nations highways and city streets...because they jut have so much of importance to say in text to a friend that everyone had better run for cover as the SUV comes bearing down on you like a text powered V-2 rocket ready to render you and the language you love into London rubble.

Shortened words...UR for example...I henc U...these are the words of the new ignorant society..and make no mistake..they are words..or intruders out to replace words that comprise our compositions. I can't imagine a poem by Poe in text, but it must exist somewhere but perhaps without the cadence and flow of flowers that propel fine poetry. War and Peace would be tragic to Tolstoy if it were reduced to a tome of 3 pages of gibberish. Do Russians text? What would that look like...we already are the dumbed down society speaking only one language, English for the most part, badly at best, and we text it like releasing a harmful disease to infect others. How do the Chinese text with replacing all their symbols..which actually is more to the point of ancient writings...symbols for words and ideas...it even looks artistic and beautiful when written down and read, and I don't even understand it but enjoy looking at it and appreciating it for it's artistic merit and conventionality.

Language is a universal bond..."The Seven Pillars of Wisdom" by T.E. Lawrence -Plato's "Republic" - Louisa May Alcott's "Little Women" - Keruacs "On The Road" -Harper Lee's "To Kill a Mockingbird" ...would these still exist as true "literature" in text? Ignornance is growing at an alarming rate...language is being rounded up, herded onto cattle cars and being taken to an Auschwitz where the ovens are ready to reduce words to ashes...it is a war against words...in Nazi Germany it was anti-semitism on a deranged rampage...now it is a similar war against similies, synonyms, antonyms, verbs, language itself, the destruction of the sentence structure..the obliteration of meaningful idea..the romance of the written word as beautiful as a garden of ideas and images....

The world is getting smaller each day..as is language..as is communication between human beings...no longer face to face dialogue but online gamers who communicate through the medium of electronics where they can assume the role of warrior Viking or Navy Seal...it too has it's own language and avatars and in effect have become the penis extender of the new male...while texting has already set the fire to burn the books, the ideas, the progress of humankind reducing it to ashes....at 411 farenheit.

The History Lession of Professor Labia

If one thing can be agreed upon, it's that history can, by showing us the past..illuminate the path to the future. It's mistakes and triumphs brilliantly displayed in text books and discussed to death by numerous academics who prefer a dimly lit study with other academics over a free session at a Asian massage parlor. History is not that complicated to comprehend, comprende? It's not brain surgery by any means and in school we're taught the ABC's and 1 2 3's of dates from the days of King Henry the 8th to the American Civil War. The problem is by learning by rote we rot! It's merely a practice of reciting dates through memorization. Remedial history recited and cited as fact...form without substance.

So how can we truly grasp history? If you are a female, it's easier then ever with the newest academic learning tool on the market today...the Talking History Dildo! You not only learn history but can achieve orgasm faster than a rocket to the moon, and lets face it.vibrators are basically rockets searching to land in your crater. Professor Labia has just completed the designs for a line of talking history dildos so you can learn with his battery operated device to jog your memory and your mammaries while you are in the rocket booster stage of orgasmic karma.Once you have mastered this history course you will be Vaginal Valedectorian and Summa CUM Loudly and move the head of your class.

The complete set will be available this Christmas at Dildo's and Strap-Ons R Us. delight her with with the Hindenburg Dildo, larger than the Led Zeppelin model it is a gas filled monster, and will recreate those wonderful years of hydrogen flight...and...uh...explosions! Except this time...the explosion is in you! So everytime your gas filled battery operated Hindenburg comes in to dock in your port...you'll remember that little piece of history! One Small Step For Man....bullshit...the Lunar Landing Dildo will take you to that giant leap for Womankind as it's retro rockets bring it down gently and safely for a landing in your crater that would make Copernicus jealous! Then of course there is the Conspiracy Theory Dildo.Once inserted in your Depository Building, and you reach orgasm...you won't able to tell if you had one massive orgasm or three on your grassy knoll!!

The Civil War Dildo is a favorite of both north and south, but when you insert it south of your own Mason-Dixon Line and crank it to "high" you'll think the entire battle of Gettysburg is raging inside of you until you reach Civil War Orgasm, which Professor Labia refers to as Appomatox and undconditional sexual surrender. The Cold War Dildo is the newest model to roll off the assemblylines... It's called the Red Zeppelin and when you turn this puppy on...your Kremlin will crumble and your Red Square will have the parade of it's life. Matching tampons are also available for the Red Square Time of the Month. They are in the shape of Ronald Reagan and are insert activated..as you insert one it says "Mr. Gorbachev, it's that time of the month Comrade and time to absord the red scare!"

Two new models are top of the line...the Pearl Harbor that has batteries but no switch to turn it on or off. In fact it's all computer operated with artificial intelligence and goes on when it feels like it...ready or not! You'll never know when the dildo will attack, so be ready! Be vigilant! Then get ready for the ultimate in Dildo Action with the Atomic Bomb! Yes, if you think there was a mighty explosion in Hiroshima, wait until this nuclear blast devastes Pussyshima! This mushroom cloud is guaranteed to melt your walls and leave you limp. Professor Labia has wroked for years in complete secrecy developing this valuable learning tool...dildos for the ladies and of course a new line of strap-ons for the men!

So look for the Union Label for the Talking History Dildo from Professor Labia's Lab (tested and approved) Distributed by Hymen Schwartz and Company a division of International Vaginal Vocational Industries...where they say..."If if fits...insert the damn thing and let 'er rip!"

The Exclamation Point: The Tampon of Literature?

By Mike Marino Writers get to engage in the act of keyboard foreplay that is at once stimulating to the senses and downright perverse if you think about it. Who else but a writer considers a completed sentence as a prelude to an orgasm of words spilling to the page to form whole paragraphs. A writer is the only person who consideres the "all caps shift key" as an erection, and suffers from All Caps Penis envy when confronted with some other writer whose Delete button is larger than his. The writer also can make the nymphomanic of a machine go into a state of extended ecstasy by continuously hitting the page up and page down buttons in fast succession. And Knows he has hit literary vaginal paydirt when he with trembling hands...hits ENTER taking it as an invitation from Lauren Bacall to enter her and wiggle his bogie while he explodes in a volcanic eruption of sexual nirvana.

Ah..but the punctuation marks...the word "punctuation" itself is close to the word "penetration" and most writers will slip it in...(another Felliniesque vision) after much re-writing or what we call the lubricating of literature to make the story words wet. A writer is cognizant of not only words but female body parts...hyphen my ass...it's code for hymen..when a hyphen is inserted into a piece, it's actually a writers way of subconsciously inserting HIMSELF into a hymens traffic flow as his literary libido goes into overdrive. He bangs the keys furiously and in heat...he makes mistakes, typos they call them because he is engaged in a literary gang bang..hitting more than one key at a time.

Even the most daring of writers try as they might, cannot escape the "period" as it happens to a writer not at "that time of the month" but at that time of the sentence structure. Luckily for him there is the trusty "exclamation point" shaped strangely like a vertical tampon lording it over a lonely period below ready to absorb it at any moment. A writer can also appreciate the female form...why do you think we use parenthesis? They are shaped like womens breasts..size 34's probably and he allows them to fall to the page of the work in hopes of allowing the enclosed words to cop a feel. The ampersand...ah...to anal to go into detail at this time...and the colon and semi colon are self explanatory..the semi colon is again code for someone who is half assed! For the BDSM crowd there is the "Control" button....and for the anal crowd..there is always the "BACKSPACE" button to consider.

Then of course we have the girl on girl punctuation marks that launch the lesbian libidio into literary orbit...the ASSTERISK! I know that's not how you spell it but you are dripping wet it doesn't matter...once she is engaged in sexual antics with another it's time to hit the "stroke" button while their "plus and minus" signs pump like a 12 cylinder engine heating up and ready to redline...and just as they are about to reach climax in the writers minds view...he hits the POUND key!

Punctuation is sexual to literature and the creators of words...but then again..it's a form of artistic masturbation that all male writers engage in...so the next time you sit at your keyboard to email...or use Facebook or to look up porn...whatever you do...don't hit "ENTER" if your dildo is out of batteries...it will only lead to frustration....Period!

p>Write On! The Writing Process

Writing is the worlds oldest profession. Don't let any one kid you. Before prostitution there were cave drawings, petroglyphs and hieroglyphs well before the dawning of the age of syphllis! Grammar before gonnorhea I always say! Literature before lesions. It was a simply time of simple symbols of predatory birds and carvivorous animals and yes, those mysterious depictions of anal probing aliens and their fashionable flying saucers and all that other "ancient ones" bullshit. It was mass communication for neanderthal crowd... prehistoric pre-history attempts at communication to the masses. The cave as communicator was truly the media of the day and a true No Spin Zone with no edicts proclaimed nor effective editorializing. You could read a Cromagnon version of War and Peace with a few symbols of man tossing a spear at a mastadon, and sexuality was simply a drawing of a Neanderthal knuckledragger hauling his hysterical historical mate into a cave by the hair with an Alley-Oop look of confusion on his face and rather large club in hand.

Eventually someone figured out that you could string together a compost of cave carvings and it would begin to tell a tale..a story...something with a plot..and characters. but not too much on plot or character developement. What do you want or expect from post-Jurassic post graduate work from someone who can only grunt, and kill before we came across the man today known as "the redneck" recently classified as the 'missing link" that bridged the social gap from hominy grits Cromagnon beer to a magnum of fine wine and filet mignon?

Eventually "writers" emerged from the slimy brine and walked the earth. Mostly handwritting great philosophical tomes in Greek and ancient Phoenician about gods, goddesses, Thebes and Rhodes! Later, with the advent of the printing press and the typewriter mass communication in the form of the written word took off faster than an adverb in heat being chased by a throng of derenged nouns intent on rape! Now writing was coming of age...plots were needed, characters had to be developed and correct punctuation had to be used for no other purpose than to allow the English Majors to masturbate over a well worded paragraph as they enjoyed form over substance as most parasites do. The English Major is the anal analogy laden arch enemy of reading for enjoyment. The English Major is actually a minor player in the scheme of major things and useless except to perform its destiny as an editor and not a creator of literature, but, rather as a a curator. The writer may be the whore in the whorehouse, but the editor is our Madam. The editor closes the deal, the writer spreads it's legs. .

The writer wrestles with or actually fornicates with formatics as though engaged in a Texas Death Match locked in mortal combat with a wily opponent (the written word!) who is out to destroy him, or at least delay him with guerilla tactics designed to impede his progress and progression in his only purpose...completing his draft. The empty page sans words is a beach at Normandy and the writer wants to establish a beach head but first must fight his way in a battle against a seasoned enemy of panzers and luftwaffe...writers block! The establishing paragraph..the opening salvo as I call it and the title elude us at first, so we send in recon teams to get the lay of the land and an accurate assesment of enemy troop movements, as well as any potential land mines or machine gun nests in the form of formulaics that may hinder our advance.and ultimately our victory after a long hard struggle with single words that form sentences, sentences that form paragraphs and paragraphs that form books, magazines, articulated articles and ultimately leading to the bombed out city of Berlin where we can finally type the words...The End!

Eventually when we dynamite the dam..the words flow forth as we down a fifth...drinking goes with writing as much as a fucking Funk and Wagnells, and if you've ever thunk to funk a wagnell your a better man than I. Mr. Webster and I do not get along either very well, as my editor is apt to point out time after time. Tennesse Williams on writing stated it best.."A writer without a bottle of whiskey is like a chicken witout a goddamned head" where as Hemingway wrote, "Write when Drunk..Edit when Sober!" Words can cascade...they can leave the bosom of the writers imagination with all he power of an avalanche in the Rockies...or fall from a pinata of ideas and plots when hit with a stick by children and the words merely take flight from the toy and fall to the ground like so much candy. He must then pick up the sweets and put them in order, some semblance of order and some resemblance of literature. Churchill said that the process of writing a book is painful.."At first the writer is in charge...half way through he becomes the slave and the book the Master..when it is complete he then tosses it to the masses to devour and kill the beast!"

All writers have different ways of wrestling with the process. I use music to fuel inject the re-writes...I work in silence on the first draft...read it aloud for cadence then start from the opening salvo with headphones in place listening to the Yardbirds or Byrds or Jefferson Airplane or Led Zeppelin and then like Ginger Baker performing solo on "Toad" I let my mind improvise and go with the beat and the cadence of the music. It's all rock and roll anyway...soon..the piece concludes...it is finished...never to perfection..you are in danger of over writing and loosing what you have that is solid...but there is relief in two little words a writer loves to type...THE END!