Trying on some ego & a prayer for Tanya Tuesday April 5, 2005 Bisbee Kate's Straw Bale House Gonna try something new today. Gonna try a little egoism. Egotism? Which is it? See, I don't even know. That's how rarely I exercise my ego. By the way, it should be noted that EVERYTHING posted from here on out this month is in direct VIOLATION of Lord Duke's promise to abandon the fucking rants and "get down to brass tacks, man!" as Thompson or Depp or Bill Murray or somebody gonzo once said. Get down to brass tacks and the heinous duty of editing this gigantanormous pile of words I jotted down on the AT and blasted off into cyberspace foolishly thinking I'd ever find a market for a rant the size of the Oxford English Dictionary. Shit. Anyway, so, here it is. Another nail in my coffin. Another three hours or so lost to jabbering for your entertainment. Bloggers, ha! I AM THE BLOG, THE BEAST, THE BULLET IN THE HEAD OF BOREDOM! [Excepting of course my cousin Justin's Blog, which doesn't suck.] I cleaned today. I washed all the windows in the Bisbee Kate's Straw Bale House. Every one. I just had to. It was just that kind of day. Perhaps it was triggered when a friend opened the blinds on the "stuck door," the one that never opens so I never bothered to raise the blinds. She raised the blinds at sunset and pow! the effect was immediate and stunning. It was the perfect sunset view from the dining table. But it was dirty. So today, I did windows. all of them. And that's not all. Yesterday I slathered 120 lbs. of wet stucco on an unfinished interior wall. And today I edited nearly 10,000 words of my AT tome-to-be. That wasn't the plan. The plan was to drive the 25-miles to the "big city" of Sierra Vista, a very big deal and a big day that I'd been working up to for some time. Today, finally, I had the money to replace that bald tire on the BMW, to pick up a much-needed printer cartridge to further my work on the manuscript (a thing unavailable in tiny Bisbee), and to buy the poor Beemer a new battery since I've been sucking it down every night charging my peripherals (oh, that I were Nathan and lived by the Scarlet Sea!). But the Beemer never made it off our road here. It sputtered and clunked such that I knew fairly quickly that I would never make the gas station seven miles distant. The gasometer or whatever it's called didn't say I was out of gas, but I have learned to distrust that little fucker. So there. I'm out of gas. Or I've killed the fuel pump. Or the filter's clogged again. Whatever. I'm miles from anywhere w/o a phone. I ain't going anywhere. It's sobering and rather refreshing to have such a thing occur and realize, "Well, that's okay. I didn't really NEED to go anywhere today. I don't have anywhere to be. My job is with me, right here, all the time." And so I cleaned windows and got heavily into my AT story whilst editing, heavily into the trail for the first time since I put my love for Jessica to bed back in November and finished the story as such online. I mean, I really got on the trail again. It's April, April fifth. I wanted to know, where was I today? And I realized quickly that I had a lot of reading to do just to catch up to "today" last year. So read I did. And edit. Hell, I wasn't going anywhere. The Beemer was dead. And here comes the ego part. I LOVED what I read. I loved every word of it. For the first time, I could see why I have a hard time cutting any of it, and why Pam, a lifelong professional editor, told me recently whilst agreeing to edit it, "I don't know what I'd cut. It's all so damn good!" I walked outside just now and stared out across the desert. Somewhere within my visibility (binoculars would help) the Minutemen vigilantes now stand "to aide" the Border Patrol in their job, as though there weren't enough of the latter to lodge in the throat of a free-thinking American already down here. But I wasn't thinking about them as I looked west watching the last vestiges of the sunset. I was thinking this: that I am likely one of the hardest working men of letters in America today. Ahh, hell, I know there's a shitload of writers out there working hard. But let's cut to the chase. How many of them are as GOOD as I am? And of that number, how many of them are unpublished and living in impoverished obscurity because they're too damn stubborn or petrified to stump for their own work in the word-buying world? Well, of whatever number you've got left there, I bet I'm Number One. I bet you I work harder at my craft than any other highly-talented unpublished writer in the U.S. I would happily go up against any other such writer in an Olympiad of non-professionals in a write-off. An essay contest, let's say. Happily. I would kick butt. There. I said it. I threw my hat in the ring and made a bold and boisterous statement of self. I am. And I am, I believe, one of the finest writers of my era. And I will be celebrated as such, if only after I am gone. Speaking of celebrated author's who suffered a lifetime before seeing success... I was outside peeing on some arrogant spiny fighter of a desert plant, I cast my gaze skyward and there Orion do I see. "Orion!" I shout. "How's Tanya doing? Are you taking good care of my girl? Are you healing her?" And then his belt distracts me. "Are you giving her your mighty sword, you beast? Stick it in deep, stick it in her ass for good measure. Tanya would like that. Fuck her back to health, my Great Orion." Henry Miller had his Tanya in Tropic of Cancer, something to do with fucking her so hard she'd sing arpeggios and have bats flying out of her ass. Henry was a dirty old man. A dirty young man, and so am I. My whole world here is candlelight and no running water, just rain water collected and splashed upon face and hands to cleanse. I live out here as I lived on the trail, more or less. And now I must go. For the iBook tells me I'm running on reserve battery, and I know the Beemers running on barely any battery so that's it. End of story. End of power. I get up and light half a dozen religious candles, those tall glass ones with saints on them and wicks that cast so little light one cannot write by them, for sure. Soon my mp3 player will likewise clock out on me. Then there will be only silence. Silence and the dim light of my headlamp and its waning three AAA batteries. Ha! Piece by piece we come apart. First the joints, the lungs, the brain, the heart. I bid you adieu, my friends, my readers, whoever you are. The web statistics people tell me with great assurance that there are roughly a thousand of you who daily visit this site. And I'm not talking search engine hits, those run more around 13,000 per day. I know. I have looked into it and checked and double-checked to make sure I was understanding the stats. I find that amazing. And I thank you. And God Bless you. A writer only ever wants to be read. That's all. Flicker, flicker, power-down. -Peregrine Jack   Copyright 2005 Richard McKinney All Rights Reserved (Just ask & I'll likely let you reprint anything!)