When It Thrashes

Who am I for The Institution but a better shapeshifting energy? A great novel can be taught. Yet a great writer must be shown in practice: I’m what can become of you if you become more like me. So then I ask, Am I the preordained inkwell’s black magic miracle? The silver beam in the sterling space reserved? And then if I’m asking myself what’s more, what’s coming soon, and what have I done for them lately, I must show I’m especially good for the convoluted love this body of inspirited fictional scripture leaves wide open, and downwind opportunity. To do well and thrive I have to and must write well from exactly where they stand, and sit, and think, and dig in their heels, even if I’m much farther afield hunting recombinant letters I’ll only assemble inside their vibrating validations. I’ve learned they’ll hint, and they’ll profess, and they’ll tell me from behind the invisibly visceral decorum of parallel anecdotal imagoes - that they wish I soon become what they’ve wanted me to become in a splendid classic fashion they’ve not anticipated.
Well better call me, Merlin, because it’s always been about a bluff. Saying, Watch me, is showing off, but saying, Trust me, is a bad omen. Can anyone worth anything write a novel-length novella in the margins of an encyclopediacally-hyper-charged runaway short story? If our bold black block letters imply zero nuance? A rabbit hole is a luxury good.
You wanna shotgun my screenshotting in this retrofitted original? My vibration is more than a quixotic crushing spectral dread paranoia, the zodiac of, everyone is out to get me, if my message becomes for you an astrology of nightmarish answers via serial killing personal demons. Would you appreciate a reading list? What are you reading? Reading wrong? I’ve an alienating inordinate ever-present anonymous amount of sincerely undeserved individual all-caps repetitive word ouroboros of text message banners awaterfalling on my iPhone threatening my life every hour of every solar circuit, because, after I openly admitted to the tight-knit sessions I teach the technique and technical elements of how one elects the elements of their original fiction and storytelling, that, I three months ago began digging for and then found a way inside our second city’s gateway to the unofficial but no less sacred Church of the NFL? I had piratical energy vampires detour my undivided attention. Fire-breathing paranoid self-sabotaging self-condemnations aside, this subjective South Carolina will do nothing if not keep a man honest about his garish glaring flaws. Forgetting I could feel emoted charge in every word was hiding behind my mask. Everyone thinks I tried to use my novel in progress to kill a very young girl, a survivor, Grace Knox. They think I convinced her to try dying for her art like Arthur Rimbaud. They think I drove the vehicle that broke the barrier, jumped out of it before she fell nearly to her icy riverine black water death. I wasn’t with her when the accident happened, because, I was with my sponsor doing service work. If you’ll hear me out I can share my all-day Sunday alibi.
If this opens in any operatic dialogue again I’m abandoning my open intergenerational wound in progress because I’ll have no justice anyone’ll care about. Too bright in knowing I know better to fool my true sensibilities by the time I was thirty two looking back on where I began writing at seventeen but I’ve brought that boy back from hell so he’s up to speed. Cutting up without liquor is my new dope. Entire major milestones made manifest in making all moments count. I’m over the moon my emotional wealth has resurfaced. Let’s get this old man down the stairs one step at a time so he can see sunshine, right now that’s all I want. He forgot how to walk because he can’t make any choices anymore. The love of his life died in his mind before she fell off the face of his earthsopshere. He misses her more than my best literary friend misses the missing pieces of his lovely unmovable library. I want them all to remember they’re more important than their money. Please check on all friends unheard from in a few hours. Both eyes are open. That’s good. Hey. Remember me? Yes. Here. Hold on. Take my hand.
One blistering summer he paid off several dozen missed payments interest included on refinanceable refrigerators when the South mostly couldn’t afford reliable air conditioning in its reasonably priced homes. He admitted his passion for giving things away freely made most of his ilk believe he’d acted upon tangible proof of the earth-angelic. The man won the lottery from a scratch-off he got on a lark on Rivers Avenue and bought everyone in the program without a fridge some peace of mind.
Head off the pillow. Look at those eyebrow curlicues. Love how sharp the estimable prow of that nose matches the jug-handle monkey ears and the swept aside n’ back hair looks not bad despite the bedhead. Come on, man, it’s me, your servant, let’s get you going. Sun is shining.
Resented the rat race. Lived and died for his favorite NFL team’s chance at dancing after another championship. You’d never guess his favorite team by the way he describes what went right and went wrong. He lost his brother during the last financial crisis, the one that’d been unwilling to part with his war stories until his last breath. You can take your slippers with you, of course, you want some socks as well, which pair, of course, the triple headed red, blue, gold, Pittsburgh Steelers black and yellow better looking than maybe any other pair he’s ever owned. I love how I don’t have to lie about his Steelers fanaticism to anybody. It’s all real and it’s all passionate because it can’t be anything but honest.
One time he interviewed a domestic terrorist at a training site and nearly abandoned the story idea he went in with to join their cause, then looked at his phone and saw one missed call from his grandson, and came home with a Pulitzer award winning piece idea he never wrote. He’s told me he’s glad he didn’t give in to it, and that that was the last time he nearly quit on this hard work worth doing. After I finish elongating the elastic on the last length of his left sock I scoop his torso from underneath the shoulders and show him he’s got what it takes to drop his bodyweight down onto and into his moccasin slippers and we slide his toes inside the compressed fluff. Let’s get you downstairs where I can share some morning sunshine with you so you’ll remember how much you love the life you live in the house you bought and filled with a family that’s never thanked you enough, I know, although, I’m here because of what you did for me, is what I won’t say because he’ll tell me it’s unbecoming, or too kiss-ass-y. All’s well past the door frame and we reach the tunneled light looking downstairs. All the names of all the bullish local metropolitan politicians from all the city council meeting notes he razed remember his because his nose for bullshit he couldn’t let slide was formidable. He worked three times as hard as the rest of them. He’s the only one of them from this thought sphere still standing.
The headlines he wrote have ears all of their own and they want what they have to say to unlock the missing notes so poetry produced by truth can turn every avid reader onto self-awareness’s utopian arcadia. He called every new transplant to the Charleston, South Carolina area an unwitting not unlovable Sapphirine Floridian. He doesn’t need the auburn hand rail if I hold him down step one and step two and three. His wincing betrays his well-earned confidence as though every weight transfer is another bullet in the brain. He asks me how his posture looks and I admit, I consider it’s not at all that bad, so his perfectly balanced and fiercely determined focused anger forces enough neurochemical supergumption through his mind’s muscle, and he stands straighter, feels tougher, and we take step three through four and five before he pauses above step six to ask what day it is and I tell him the Super Bowl was last weekend, and because I’ve referenced football, he knows it is Sunday, which sends him into a mesmer much like the marvel I see when I make it make sense for myself when I tell people about the Church of the NFL. The only way to remain impartial while covering the local government in the South is to abstain from all faith-based fellowship.
They loved him so much for what he did for the community’s literacy rates and libraries and cultivating their own love of letters they called him the one they tell stories about, but most of those people have passed on, and here he is on his way into Sunday sunshine such as it is, sixty four degrees and he says, down past step seven, eight, nine, he’s in no need of any jacket, sweatshirt, vest, this faded red rag wrinkled collar claret t-shirt should suit him just fine, are you sure, yes, that’ll be fine.
We crook around the middle landing’s corner and the living room marvels at what a miracle he makes out of the simplest routine activity. She’s gone now but his and her family’s favorite knit pattern DMT waiting room fractal polychromes, forever incrementally rewoven by frequent use, are draped on the sofa, big chair, the back of the one wood chair I left one on the last time we made it onto the front porch before the last Super Bowl, last weekend. He reminds me he’s glad he never tried out sportswriting, like I did, like I do now every day, because he loves my writing but he could never do anything about how much he cared about who won and lost each game. I lie and I tell him I’m adept at compartmentalizing my fandom when I’m on the job and he makes me feel emboldened when he says he believes me because the rest of my newsroom clearly doesn’t, because, of course, that’s their job.
We take step ten, eleven, twelve and we’re on the ground, abask in sun shooting through the leaves on the low branches of the trees lining his wall of windows. The splashed poker chip chunks roll off his frame and mine and we trudge gently towards the sliding glass door. We make it through the threshold, this humble routine play complete, we don’t need to talk about anything, we just listen to the wind, watch for what works, write it down when it does and praise our higher power howsoever it chooses to reveal itself to us, be it the words we share, or what we don’t say, and I’m proud I can be of service to a Southern gentlemanly tribal elder who made sure I had a job to do after I’d suffered more than long enough. He asks me how my family’s doing, I say, Whole lot better, now that I remain sober. I tell him I’m grateful he’s my sponsor. He says that sponsoring me is more for him than it’s ever been for me. We know enough by now to know what it means when we nod in synchronicity. This life? A great gift. Eighty eight years young, and faith aflame eternal.
I’m suspected of attempted murder by an entire community I’ve grown to love. Painted as and made out to be a love-hunting lascivious lunatic. Although if you asked my life partner, my family, where I was, she wouldn’t want to lie to you so she’d say what I told her, which is that I overnighted at my sponsor’s house, because I’m too comfortable sleeping on other people’s couches, now; now that she thinks I think I don’t ever need her bedsheets anymore, which is not true. She would also speak on all of what my influencing attempts want to work on, or what I worked out within every living room I used to inhabit, wherein within no time I’d make sure my hometown living room appeared in the present. How’s that work? Look? Look at this slick illicit hard liquor, delicacy of a descendant of prohibition era moonshine, slide across the long side of the auburn copper coffee table for far too long before the drip-tip tapering droplet body tumbles floorward, towards floorboards gone clearly broomless since last century. I make a mess appear and ask, Who’ll make the mess eventually evaporate? Not me. It’s not my fault.”
If in your estimation you finally think you see everything as it is - and everything looks like the sky? Stop trying to define vertigo - you don’t know and have never known how to identify aerospace. What’s more, you clearly can’t see what you’re saying when you argue too well how your one-with-everything means nothing. Your everything is kind of nothing and you’ve lost the peculiar ability to know where you should fear to tread, ever more clownishly out of your element with every step. All’s why you must now aim, without aiming; drive slow, slower, cruise. Personal redemption is never not sinister, tricky, memoirian, Luciferian.
Should you finally start your soul’s career correctly, your smart phone’ll feel ineffably different in your hands. Once you’re no longer waiting in line - and you’re on, and you’re in touch, and you’re in it, everything you’re looking at begins looking back at you: because you look different. You will know your standards, therefore where you stand. Your harder truths hurt less if you can hustle, know this and you hold a certain heft: that of all of which you had to give up to have a chance.
In my instruction as novelist writing a novel, using his life for his novel, I’ve crossed many boundaries by my showing student novelists how to kill the game. On one night in question, I shouldn’t’ve requested secrecy, but I swore one student novelist to a timeline minus what he could do honestly. Honestly my too high expectations entered him into a traumatic chain of events I shouldn’t’ve given him unlimited access to before I knew he could handle all of it. It went like this: Ozzie acts like he thinks I know he’s not totally there yet, not on my level, and not now here with me, not comfortably dropped into the snug pocket of the colors of his confidence. And I sense he’s close to it in his own eyes – far closer to earning his own emerging stripes. We’ve rolled into a Charleston that is at the heart of but is locally not aware of the more true and full and real and newer and total Southeastern Atlantic coastline-encompassing larger Charleston range put forth by Charleston Charlemagne’s redistricting of our Freemasonville Technical College: living in a new old city inside a city inside the idea of a city inside a city.
Tonight’s vibration is unique – and its own; as it is every night. Here I’ll require hyperactive high spirits – a source of spiritual heat with no legs, no plans, no stakes. Charleston is not an easy city to see through, because the slow cooking steam of the unimpeachably easy-going tempo remains unendurably high-pressured, while slowly muttering, “Aren’t y’all enjoying us? Just look how gentle we are to all y’all. Yes, it’s my pleasure.” After long suffering the code of conduct that when threatened reverts to an upstanding but enforceable nonchalance, the unseen eyes of foresight’ve shown me the Charleston neon I desire isn’t easily cornered – nor will I capture the neon then come away with it totally, fully unscathed; because after catching onto one impossible chance to contain any Charleston neon, a neon like none other, one learns of the next complication, the more challenging obstacle, how best to contain and show it without showing it to anyone. I have to have one hand on my temperament, one hand on my tempo; and I must touch without touching the hot bothered monkey knotted city’s pulse in my own if I’m to say what someone else should be doing.

Ozzie’s consistently looking to me for directions. Eventually Ozzie will trust me. And I want that too. But he shouldn’t trust me now, not all the way – and really he shouldn’t trust me anywhere close to as much as he does; and he’d be best served if his level of trust in me were closer to no trust at all; just for right now; because Ozzie needs to know without performing his knowing, that he cannot say he believes in me while I know that he can, if pressed for one second, make the case, that, clearly, arguably, all his faithful distrustfulness is rational; it means survival.

Ozzie cannot know I cannot warn him, nor will I generally ever prepare any other person’s participation in any action, until actions I plan for anyone in my presence can – by the outside influence under my influence – be completely and perfectly mistaken as the outside influence’s very own living experience of what’s happening. They must not know I know I believe I’m the only one hard at work whenever I bewitch the way they’re watching this particular life unfold. So I don’t mention to Ozzie I know the exact moment everything here’ll go totally haywire; because Ozzie needs to know he must first look to and believe in himself exactly when everything here gets far too out of hand way too fast – before he thinks to look to me to solve his problems. For this skill, he must develop a clairvoyance. He has to learn to read through these lifelines, see his strides ten steps ahead, must run the right route when a pattern offers him options as it is opening up. He must know chaos has had him set in its sights. It sits in his name and it twists within his voice.

I can see where Ozzie’s eyes will look when the unimaginable’ll become unbidden. He should know where to look without allowing what he’s watching to know he’s looking. And in this vein, I want him to feel more than see I’ve come to Charleston equipped with a quality in my voice, a charge in my name, a voltage in my aura; I’ve a monstrous virile rage set to wash through then overcome and race out onto the waves and sounds and vibrations of my subjective South Carolina because my uncontrollable strange truth is when I take full form, shape, style, in downtown Charleston, I become insidious; a nameless density; a mind joined to an all-knowing nocturne prepared to do nothing but disrespect what plays fairly in the sunlight.

The great Southern Gods of this divinely protected North American port city are guided by the immortal forces of Forever Rushing Onward and Flowing Forward. These forces cannot stop. These forces must continue. These forces do not respect nor believe in friction. And one must faithfully go not only along but headlong with the enforced program’s momentum and run at speed with the turning and changing and ripping tide of ins and outs and remain apace these tumultuous energetic transitions and never for one moment disagree with what’s said by the shape of things to come like there’s no choice and no chance to slow down one’s many transformations no matter the quality of one’s preparation beforehand: because you must become the black floodwaters of all things to come before you start to get going.

In this emotional jabberwocky you’ll find what you’re made of, and you will see revealed, Psychic Onslaughts. You will suffer from unrelenting Paranoid Avalanches. You will never not respect the Riptide of Emotional Hurricanes. Your head will hurt. Your breathing will shallow and deepen when you least expect it. Your name will not be your name anymore.

You will know you know you don’t know where you’re standing.

Encountering any and all South Caroline paranormal activity means one shall have divulged for their imagination and consciousness yet another cumulatively unchecked – aggravated by those erroneously not observing tradition, ritual, and custom; for years and decades and centuries or more, entirely and – near perfectly personified force of life from not too far but still outside what one has already accepted about life; and this paranormal activity will always be formed of the emotional motion of an attention-seeking desire embodying and emphatically and dramatically performing part of or all of their message for all y’all – in a far too comfortably dismantled rip in the fabric between not coequal but provably coexistent realms of reality; because the force of the spirit performing doesn’t wish nor care to know that we know their energetic infiltration of our vision and our lives is only ever a specific version of their singularly stylish narcissism; narcissism so potent it survives the death of the physical body that then, in turn, in truth, shows one and all that in this life of yours, your perception describes for you the unlimited menace required for mastering one’s emotional range; until one finds and flows with and rolls onward in an awareness they’re following a not non-existent light, but an impossible end to a true darkness, until the same impossible internal light of the spirit comes alive in one’s life: this odd thing has always been about so much more than mind over matter.

Upper King Street gags on the gloss of the garbled gargling glitter of lights that litter its bottlenecked streets until the chock-full sheen’d windows of bulging waterlogged heat resemble low-fi thermal images in some never crystallizing murk of too many sources of too many voices saying too many things just to say things. Slowly some of these sayings begin to ring and sustain, and then they sing out through the four-centuries-old tight canyons of street-facing stone buildings protecting the flasks and flagons and flaskets of arrogance that allow for the flipping of cigarette butts and lighter sparks to devolve then transform into big watches and just-shaved bare legs and bronze shoulders.

The nightlife here gives any visitor the notion that it’s all about you; you’ve known that all this was and is never not always all rampantly reproduced in every part of your mind as a fly scintillant splinterization – a never not attractive flashiness. Like the luminosity of this spectacle knows it must bring people together in order to exist. And the white powder of this electrical power of this specific one type of nightlife is for hours slathered on the upside-down mirrored ceilings of itself before you know where your feet fall. In windows we pass, I see Ozzie getting mad he’s working on a story, and not now lost to the crowded carousing. He seems somber. I sense he’s deeply suspicious too. He believes he’s auditioning for part of my personal respect, my professional vouchsafe.

I say, “Remember where we parked our silver muscle car?”

Ozzie says, “We parked the silver muscle car two dense ancient urban blocks west of Upper King.”

I say, “The silver muscle car is slotted in an illusion, and a gray area: a non-tow-away zone; and she’s two feet from an antique but not really original red iron oxidization gunk-coated fire hydrant.”

Ozzie says, “Our curb spot is not metered. It raises pangs and I feel recurring alarums. What I have to know is my unnecessary double checking and excruciating self-excoriating; this kind of mind should never be shared aloud unless life-threatening danger’s being dispensed.”

Donks. Carolina-squatted trucks. Lifted trucks. Low-rider trucks. Motorcycles. Motorcycles with chrome front wheel rims bigger than Mini Cooper windshields. Huge exotic imports revving. Godzilla is here too. German coupes. Glistening never muddied Jeeps. Hummers. A Plymouth Prowler. G-Wagons. A Dodge Viper. More golf carts rolling, gliding, flying round here than are ever seen at ninety-eight percent of local golf courses. Flocks of bar flies. College of Charleston. The Citadel. Medical University of South Carolina. University of South Carolina. Clemson. Tourists. The Savannah College of Art and Design. Navy. Air Force. Marines. Army. Tour guides. Local celebrities. Local swingers. And the mixing in of the late twenties, early thirties, and too-monied-to-not-feel-like-they’re-at-least-for-tonight-so-very-good-looking crowd out here in numbers big enough to suspend belief, for instance, that, I’m a father or mother to someone young within the next decade.

A greater Southern lie is not evil incarnated, but rather the better announced enunciation’s affirmation of a more than sly wit. Most liars are annoyed with how bored they are once they know the truth. In the South, you should only lie when you’re sure you’ll complement their expectations of what they believe’ll become their actual life experience.

My trust in a more true deceit comes from a place of knowing what all and one wishes to become after first accepting that the outside influence in my life is a reflection of my personal momentum. I’ll give you one good example of something monotonous but ludicrous. The Jawbreaking Bayou Bengal was the name of my old color-changing pipe. Jawbreaking like Jawbreakers; symbolizing transition; the slow, dark, cold, more personal growth made visceral; made from too much caution tape shredded to construct a confetti the grungy color of a tall crane over a second city’s skyline – as a way to build this life-long line by line’s universe – abruptly underscored by its own fangs.

What gives you the edge? The perfect blade in your hand? The way you walk? Could it be both and then more than you thought to imagine? What’s a writer’s winningness other than what feels great? Is this winning? What is winning? There’s almost always a good reason to use whatever word you want. My embouchure thanks you.

So all y’all better take the right train of thought, tonight, and tomorrow, no matter the desolations of my preliminary devilsome locomotions; and let me be abundantly forthcoming and sincere: the universe of the novel wishes for nothing more than if you’ll please maximize your ability to give you to you.

And take your time with it – or it’s woebegone.

I got over my fear of being too tired to intensely concentrate. The Church of the NFL I write for is where No Fiction is Lying. In the work of a more novel novel, we must hunt a different kind of glow – like we’ve only ever craved a different kind of alternative buzz. This is radical love.

What sound does a neon sign make?

What’s worth your time is timelessnesses: it’s what you have if and when you make time make your moments far more than momentary.

Ozzie says, “I’m amazed.”

I say, “Why? I told you I knew we’d find him here. This is a man that has to make a scene.”

Ozzie says, “But look at this shit – I didn’t anticipate I’d spot our target bouncing in a red-backed booth beside a bay window. He’s his own billboard for his bad temper and bad manners: his shamelessness.”

I say, “Brazen, brash, ballsy. Great linebacker.”

Ozzie says, “Belligerent demon destroyer of worlds in your head.”

I say, “Hits you: makes you forget where you put your blackouts.”

I elbow Ozzie, check his reflexes, Having fun? He brushes off his shoulder. We study the foot traffic – then we stare again, virtually straight up, where on high, holding forth, on the top level of a triple-decker bar called Talk of the Top of the Town is none other than Cortez Cabellero.

Cortez Cabellero runs a four point three forty. And in the NFL draft this past April, he was selected fifth overall by the Detroit Lions.

Cortez Cabellero is a made man – but we’re watching him snort lines of cocaine off some girl’s caramel-colored coffee bean freckled tits.

Cortez Cabellero fears nothing.

I say, “Holy hell.”

Ozzie says, “This motherfucker’s asking for it.”

Paying five times the cover charge, we cut the line outside the door. And inside I can hardly hear my own voice. Still – I try to say to Ozzie as much as I say to the rest of the room, “Why does climbing a flight of stairs before my first drink never ever once feel like hard work?”

Ozzie says, “The anticipation of pleasure is often better than the pleasure sought.”

We summit three full flights of stairs then Ozzie asks me what he’s supposed to tell people he’s here for, should they ask him, and I don’t want to tell him what by now he should know he needs to know.

I say, “Tell them to go along with the program. Like yourself.”

All hesitation abandoned, we zag through the crowd. We slide into Cortez Cabellero’s one-sided conversation by thanking him for covering the total cost of the several Long Island Iced Teas that my friend and I here tremendously enjoyed. My window reflection winks at me: my interior ADHD monologue thinks I’ve played a good attention-getter; a thing that ingratiates without alarming; sly, right, correct; until Ozzie cloddishly collapses into, “Why would a stranger go out of their way to make you look good if everyone already knows you look better than everyone else because of what you were before you walked in here?”

Cortez Cabellero sits at the base of his brain stem with a bright blade. Annoyed, he says, “Alright. What’s this?” He clips his language, oddly; everyone I know with brain trauma chops and screws their words. There is a brutal secret in the severity of the slight under-enunciation. Everyone here sufficiently stunned, silenced, I have no choice and no option to slow play this thing anymore. So I jump into my scheme.

And I tell Cabellero his Clemson senior season’s game film was by far my favorite highlight package from all the available NFL Draft coverage resources I used. Used? Used for what? Used for the endless days during the back-to-back weeks when I was writing and breaking down for my loyal readers how Cabellero so often and so much better and more efficiently than other players at his position in the NFL draft, would spot then sabotage halfback draws on run-pass-options behind the line of scrimmage. How did he do it? What I saw was a gifted set of eyes. You and I know that sports are about so much more than a simple game with a final result. And many great athletes, like writers, possess superb observational skills. You noticed the entire season, without letting on you knew what you knew the whole time, that the tell that gives the play away was nothing the quarterback ever did – but rather the odd angle of almost every starting ACC right guard’s right foot when it got set up too perfectly perpendicular to the line of scrimmage. It was a foot ready to use as an instant and lateral leverage point. A no-wasted-motion kind of unidirectional first push into a big step in one direction only – until the nearby tight end finishes setting the edge where the slot receiver stops the cornerback for what the offense hopes will bounce the inbound defensive end and nose tackle and blitzing linebacker too far outside the entire defensive rush – so the defense on that side of the field all winds up way too far back behind the entire play; as the running back squirrels and squirts and squiggles up the field from first behind the right side block near the right hip of the center – before he, Cabellero, sees all this happening before it happens and delays his blitzing one half second more: so he blows the entire play up for a tackle for a loss. Right guards cheating, half-stepping on lines’ll have the better linebacker destroy everything they’ve tried gaining by taking half one first step too early. Right guards’ll never know progress with Cabellero on the field – because he sees everything.

Ozzie says, “Jesus Fucking Christ.”

I say, “I had to figure out at least one reason why you were so fucking good last year. We know speed kills. But you were much faster than anybody in the rest of your draft class. I had to figure out why you should and would go from broke to multi-millionaire overnight.”

Cabellero doesn’t speak – but he wants to tell me to fuck off and die, I’m sure. He thought no one knew how he did what he does. Now that he knows I’ve noticed how he notices what he notices to make his natural four-three-forty-yard dash speed seem twice or three times as fast when closing down space and dropping opponent ball carriers, he knows full well that nearly all if not every single opposing coaching staff member on every NFL team has seen what I’ve written about. Yet they would never reveal they know how he knows what he knows; he’d only notice what he’s doing isn’t working like it worked before until he either became demoralized, destitute and relegated to the practice squad – or an excellent example of evolution. One’s successful revisions to win and to steal back the momentum of any major, secret, sacred advantage must be silent enough to have their ends and edges necessarily stealth their next desperate need for their next extra edge while the current edge hustles to maintain itself, ignoring the notion that for hard work to work it needs forthcoming endlessness in order to survive.

I say, “Did you tell these lovely ladies you were the best linebacker in the country because you couldn’t be fooled? Did they already know?”

Ozzie tells me later that before this question, each girl in Cabellero’s battery had radiated a perfect silhouette of richly colored confidence. Each one in a dress of one color – that when conjoined with the others had made one entire rainbow of erotic options. Watching me ramble on, they’d more near than entirely gone the living level of a cartoonish and ghostly white, ivory, porcelain; and the opposite form from their first wild, impasto, polychrome editions of great bodies of conversion; like the details in a recent New Yorker piece he’d read on Roman statue colors: although the statues’ shapely articulations once featured garish, wild, outlandish shades and tones and paints, we thought that when we first found them in ruins entirely whitewashed and alabaster’d, we were safe to believe, that based on this first exposure, that when we found what we found, that this was the only way it once always was – austere, bland, marble stone. If the mindlessness silencing spoken potions of the heavy metal jargon, slang, rhetoric, of professional football’s unspoken language is exposed then consistently proven the same kind of wild color we found on these Roman statues we’ve since had to reevaluate because we learned of their makers’ sophistications, then we’ll stop pretending professional football is as dumb as a family vocation of vocal fry’d television just because it is nationally popular throughout the same medium. One doesn’t say every letter is the same just because it’s delivered through USPS – different things say different things. And we’ll know the dominant chroma of their great conversation has surceased; when competitive jabberwockies are not misunderstood by the larger layperson audience. In time, people without a background knowledge of the football strategy sounds coming from anyone’s mouth will stop saying, What in the living hell are you talking about? Ozzie’s observations of this moment do not occur to me because I’m locked in on how Cabellero responds to what I’m describing in order to counter what he counters with, so I can somehow win his trust before I abuse what advantage I’ve gained to write in life what I need on the page – I cannot make out the locations of the colors of these feminine threads. I have one assignment. I have to get this made man out of the situation he’s made up. Ozzie’ll tell me later that if I had had eyes in the back of my head during my tangent, I’d’ve seen these enticing polychromatic elegances take one small step backward every other half run-on-sentence I’d hurled at Cabellero, until all were just beyond the realm of orbiting his red booth’s outer bands of overhead lighting’s shadow.

I say, “Their first great hustle is finished.”

Longwindedly reminded that what he does for a living is what countless others also do for a living, I see Cabellero’s awaiting some self-made sign he’s returned to a non-nocturne personality. It’s a feeling: he knows I want to completely capitalize on his knowing he’s been reminded of the rules of competitively simulated non-lethal killing’s requirements for all conduct off the field.

I say, “Every honeypot’s been overturned – and it is mellifluous.”

Once his cheeks turn rosy pink, I begin feeling the unmistakable heat of a seven-faced collective blush boiling so rash and voluptuously that it signals to life outside his mind all long games’ve abruptly ended.

Cabellero sees how these colors have stolen his personality; line-for-line mimicked him so well they’ve become his very own living, breathing, flirting mirrored surface.

He hates it.

Hates me.

Hates what I’ve brought into the constant waterfalling amber lumens on top of his auburn hands on top of the rich red table. The colorful dresses have almost completely faded into the night beyond Cabellero’s space.

I say, “Your big blindspots personified will kill all your darlings because you thought you could think you’ve killed all your darlings.”

Cabellero snaps. He demands they return to his red booth at their greatest strutting velocity, calling them back to his fringes, his edges, his lines, like he’s changing defensive assignments in the coverage scheme to reconfigure the bulk of the current play at the line of scrimmage because they’re not going to pass the ball to the right because one wide receiver’s left the slot and run leftward in motion and circled behind the center; and Cabellero cannot stop gritting his teeth; because he knows I’m right; and in doing what I’ve done, I’ve committed to running off the women he’d been enormously enjoying – because he thinks tonight he didn’t have to work for what he’d already worked for on the field.

I say, “We’ve both fundamentally different perspectives of how one gets what’s earned here. You’ve won half or more of one night playing the perks of your version of your simplest face and name recognition. At Clemson, you knew the names of all defensive coverage details’d mean very new and different things based on how you’d played them in the last week. Every opponent adjusting to your adjustments. In the NFL? It’s just that much fucking faster. We know your tendencies too well. We know you better than your digital image. College football’s name, image, and likeness deals are vastly different and better for Southern players. You’ve got to ask, What do you really look like in money bigger than you can imagine? Who has your back? Is a better future’s greatest threat how unbelievably attractive human history becomes when it is the dominant and preferred destination once a proverbial holding up a mirror is proffered as one’s common remedy and considerably heartfelt antidote? Tell me why the police helicopters in my old neighborhood only ever ran up Rivers and Dorchester. This is where the action was.”

Ozzie’ll tell me later it seems I live in a universe where sometimes you’ll find you’re so ferociously in love with how you’re doing what you’re doing – you do not notice you’re forgetting how often you need to rest to remain good at what you’re doing. Cabellero cannot get one word in edgewise. Conversations require balance – lest they become screeds. He’s not in the mood to get yelled at – yet if I’d tried praise-showering Cabellero from an NFL Front Office-specific rhetoric style guide that he and other new stars are too well trained by now to not not know; identify; and respond and react to; like when someone immersed in one conversation hears their name said in another conversation far across the room at a party; a unique language used because this is what everyone knows everyone’ll always respond to; Cabellero would want to reject the hype, the volts, the watts of my glowing speech.

Cabellero says, “I don’t want to hear you praise me for what I’m the best at, man. I’m not into any silly shit like that coming from you.”

I say, “Valuable talent is something you create in realizing what you are. At the next level, every talented athlete commits their bodies to a trust fall every time they step on the field. The NFL player in today’s game is playing games like a gladiatorial death will result on one side or the other. The act repeated makes the player the product of a rehearsal – he is theater, and he is an actor in a war game of kinetic charisma. The athlete takes this trust fall for the professional organization, knowing the NFL’s body of work is the result of a script. Playing college football – you had to perform the professionalism of the professional for four years before some professional organization took a major chance on you. At Clemson, you were an artist – more Southern thespian than anything else. Any Southern actor in this much humidity is an animatronic skiff.”

Ozzie catches my slight allusion to skiff, suggesting, to Cabellero, many of us have seen from his window the near cigarette boatload of cocaine he’s ingested before witnesses for the better part of the last several hours – and thereby flaunting to all Upper King Street what he thinks he’ll get away with; so Ozzie steps forward to make some forceful point – but he’s abruptly caught between one primary colored dress set in motion, cleavage right at his eye-level; and then Ozzie says, “The rare commodity wants what it wants and is good at what it does, because when it wants what it wants it goes out of its way to get what it wants.”

A shrill, “What the fuck does that mean, asshole?!” precedes Ozzie getting shellacked from his blindside by another dress of the same primary color. The red of redemption extends beyond what the NFL does on the field. My entire bewildering play is broken but somehow not totally blown up. Ozzie stumbles crabways, panicking. And he and the flowing recalescent soul in the red dress who’d maybe just sat here for Cabellero’s ice turns all blood-lusting queen and shoves Ozzie again as he jostles for footing and they turn and they shout and they fall the whole short way down two landing-connected consecutive flights of stairs. The staff dressed in jet black – and way too sober for this time of night – intervenes. With no sense of humor whatsoever, and all acting as though they’re sure all of Cabellero’s evening’s spending’s entirely complete, they try grabbing the biggest guy in the room. And for once it isn’t me. I’m not the problem, I just provoked it. Everything seems to happen in the shadows. Everything happens when no one’s watching. Through the chaos constructed by my getting under Cabellero’s skin, we don’t exactly kidnap the man, but we steal his thunder from his night – as everything comes tumbling, gamboling, crashing down all three levels of the Talk of the Top of the Town. Outside, I find Ozzie, remarkably unscathed, unblemished, unfazed. You good, man? He’s fine. But that girl. The girl is unconscious. And she looks, holy fucking hell, most likely paralyzed by the fall down the stairs. Cabellero chucks a bouncer through a gigantic glass window. Stepping over the bloodied man, over the atomized rubble, onto the sidewalk, he glares at me like, I’m next, until he’s distracted, redirected – because two half seconds later Ozzie gets hit by an Uber Black Cadillac Escalade. Ozzie rolls out of the four-ton blow. He limp-runs back at the broken blue headlamp beams and screams at the driver and draws every single eye. And I make sure no one sees what I’m doing when I’m doing what I have to do – because you have to make sure no one sees you coming when you blitz your target. And I do exactly what I came to do. And no one notices a thing when I strike the soft spot – then smother the shriek with my off hand. I casually lay the felled casualty in between two parked cars. Backpedaling into a crouch on the curbstone, I re-sheath a slim foot-long stiletto. A ruby Chanticleer emblem studded handle sticks out over the edge of the leather ankle holster I hide underneath a dark denim cuff. Locomoting up the block toward the source of the clamor, I shove the Uber Black driver into the door of his Escalade like he’s at fault. Everyone believes my confidence, including the man who knows better, when, “For this man’s trouble!” I demand five hundred dollars; Ozzie grabs it; he, “gets,” it; we walk; the aciculate stiletto edges still covered in the real and true Cabellero’s blood, I tell Ozzie how Cabellero doesn’t have the requisite jabberwocky investment nor the legs right now to pursue any sort of open-field tackles – so I need you to get the fuck on with it with me, and I need you to help me lug him down the block in less than two minutes, where we can ditch him in front of some unoccupied emergency vehicle painted neon orange.

At once, Ozzie stops, “Thinking so goddamn much,” and he helps me get something done: we drop off the feckless hulk; and I say to Ozzie that this is a major sports-writing moment of growth completed – and then we’re off. Two blocks north and west. Northward in our silver muscle car toward a new blazing sun we’ll race all night toward another sizzling and predictably unpredictable morning in Freemasonville; back inside the idea of the city within this city where we both know there’s a deadline, really just my deadline, so I’m not really done for the night, but Ozzie knows that we’re done for the night. IYKYK. In this silver muscle car, at the wheel and beyond all thought, I say, “I stabbed Cabellero below the spine, where I was trained to strike. Guarantee he’s out for at least one full season. Every single year at least one top ten NFL Draft pick misses his first regular season. Injuries everywhere. People don’t wonder why this happens to such promising talent. They expect it. On some level they’re amazed more athletes aren’t injured.”
Ozzie knows this violence is far more true and real than some jabberwocky exercise. He’s rattled. He’s bruised. He’s much stronger.

I say, “I’ve got to get going on my piece. Will you transcribe for me – or unless you want to drive while I write my first Cabellero draft?”

Ozzie says, “I’ll drive.”

We trade places in the vehicle while it’s moving. My fingers pound and spasm. They hammer at this hard work worth doing. And I quote from the best of my memory while Ozzie pilots the silver muscle car north and south and east and west as I interview my colder self for the facts of what I can remember while we remain in motion and aloft.

Ozzie says, “Hey, man. I don’t know if you saw me get run over.”

I say, “I’m not trying to be a jackass but I can’t hear you talk until we’re back – then we’ll draw up, run through, reconfigure, and improve our next play. If you broke something, say something now. Otherwise.”

Ozzie doesn’t apologize, he nods ahead over the dashboard into the splash of our Ford brand headlights. Silver, sonorous, swooning. Our lanes are free of all traffic aside from huge trucks. Hammer out the rest of my stuff’s first run until my eyes fade. Smoke. Smoke again. The purple curls through orange and yields a mystic moss. It makes my mind put the whole entirety of the text away. I need to let my ADHD loose, run free, watch the road. I’ll look at the piece with better, fresher eyes – when I see myself walk and sit down in front of my windows: a different, You, in my very next room, where the dry, cracked, desiccated drudgery of the phrase, My Office, has vanished. Since my last visit I’ve made more of my life outside of my dwellings by committing to one long night’s worth of hard work. I know what kind of Charleston I’m walking into this round; a Freemasonville, a universe, a town, a thing where I’ve made these ancient neon signs come aglow, abloom, ablaze, taunting, declaring, JACK LIVES HERE. More comfortable in rugged conditions, and maybe it’s for the better, I see I’m somewhat softer than I thought, I care that Ozzie slept on the hard bench outside my office.
A greater Southern lie is the theft of a greater Southern novel. The adrenaline of something special: this is the Big Book in Black for the phantasmal fiction we forge in order for fifth dimensional lives to lift from impersonalized underworlds into what you’ve wanted all along. Commandments, guidelines, covenants. Things you know you should be telling yourself now in order to live the only one way you want. Trust me: this is how all y’all get fly. It’s the mastered craft of showing your style in taking away your senses from the world you’ve inhabited together – so everyone cannot avoid seeing you’ve intensified the elastic of the emotional trapeze work of how you know more senses completely since what’s made of all of them in you is compressed into an altered and alternative perceptual altar of your common, “Now.” IYKYK why the modern attack sentence argues its dipsomania-inducing mysticism must remain astonishingly popular – because it is anonymous. What do you see in your knowing you know nothing? A blackout? The euphoria? The consequences? A greater novel should know it shows you all itself through reflecting its construction. Grace Knox is a revival of self-belief when people feel she survives because she’s never anyone’s enemy. If we know a good, truer form of sincerity is hard to come by – it shouldn’t just always be so goddam easy to pick up on and to read, that would be lying. And that wouldn’t be true fiction. Many tried inventing a New Journalism near when my mentors published their first paranoid novels to great acclaim. A New Fiction is that I’ve invented my emotional interior design by inscribing inside of its minutiae my forever honest deceit to show you the reason why I am this one way; to show you why I’m infinitely interested in the endlessness of the too complicated myth I tell myself so I may soon feel like a newer better black electra Lucifer on your white page’d perception while perched on your one shoulder to sing this one aria: every modern novel in modern fiction composed in modern too warm welcoming prose isn’t actually bad at all; it is wrong.

Grace Knox texts me, “Wallball with Merlin’s what I want.” I want to say what I know she would never want me to say to her, “I’m learning what you bring out of me is a vision: Grace Knox isn’t dark, mean, nor cold; she is only too sincerely far too colorfully contrasted by warmth.” All I text back is, “What’s that?” to look around. Here the South’s drunk on their own theatrical traumapainkilling heroin. They don’t take kindly to new Yankee bullydome. Don’t want it, don’t need it, don’t hear your reticence as kindness. They won’t tell you they won’t read your research if they don’t like how you sound when you talk about it. Describe what you feel? They desperately require this rebirth’d era. The South doesn’t want dark sunfall. They crave empurpled nights arisen. Mia texts me, “The thrill of the used book buy you know’s a steal’s both buoyant and euphoric. Color covered and black and white’s brightened in every tedious granulation’s shift.” The one beauty is the wrong thing and the other more right for me and morally correct beauty is the other one I talk to on the side of my sense of reality. And so my better work is to work on the correctable elements of these connections in these writers as I staggeringly become one of their neuxsons under lambent starfire. Our best bright barbs of revolutionary spiritual carnage derive from digging in your heels to survive the madness of your more inborn demonic spiritual attacks; not flinching; all as all y’all too nonchalantly watch Palmetto trunk shards – stacked over so many decades of growth that they now look like nothing more than eleven dozen shoulder chips enfolded – stop cannonballs. Grace texts me, “Am I saved as life partner in your phone yet? Am I her? Did I steal her phone? Who is she? Silver bullets smelted until they’re steel wheels of fortune? You found a new way to kill the game. This is trust. Reincarnation. Wartime. Vengeance.”
One must honor every individual letter of their spontaneous inspiration. Yet, where the hell did that come from? How often are powerful artists attacked with the siren song of a great artless financial opportunity? Fuck. All the time – constantly. Temptation outwits all good sense the farther one or any artist moves away from their ironically unserious money-making idylls. The artist traveling down ever deeper into their uniquely interpersonally lacerating standards of what rare and true beauty demands, the stronger the encroaching temptation to sell one’s soul’s product – quite possibly, woefully, very far short of what it’s really worth – will become and grow and persuade.

Grace Knox texts me, “I’ve never felt more comfortable calling myself crazy. Is it that? That could be a lot of it. Could be none of it, nothing to do with it.”

But the artist sure of their tried and true personal discipline within their art and form should most often nearly always disrespect to disregard all thoughtful byproducts sprung from all outside minds far too openly only cash-prudent; for their pseudo-creations will prove they prevail upon you to propound and protect their highbrow’d hustling for their material status gains alone. Any devilsome locomotion is only the best fool’s gold of the more than vain divination. However, all that being said, your preferred personal Robin Hooding’ll always feature far less collateral damage if it’s correctly described. If you can remember your blindspot is rigged against your certain defeat? When it thrashes, when it’s triggered, when it’s more than menacing, totally threatening, openly intolerant of you and yours completely, the personal shape of editing your personality’s experience inside of your fiction is then not the cutting but the dodging of the black magical manifestation’s blowback.

What do you know you’re not noticing right now?

You appear most insane to the world when you lionize your word.

My equilibrium’ll tell me it begins with – for you, man? – here is way too much. All at once. According to some in popular psychology, this thing is often the telltale, classic, trademark sign of a narcissistic sociopath. I wouldn’t openly admit to that if I were one. Or maybe I’d somehow try to win all your confidence for, in me, by pretending to admit to an awareness of my defects. I should confess I desire to share confidential stories I believe invaluable toward alleviating my spiritual malnourishment, and severe mental afflictions – stemming from the skunkworks of my consistent and clear, though sight unseen, illogically recombined emotional deformities. I’m not the first tall tale-telling evil bastard to ask, “If I swear off better sense, logic, predecessors and then disassociate from lettered predispositions, literary prejudices, and literal pride, can I ask myself on the page with no clue what I might come up with; as if I am my other mind or what I have held captive: this hijacked jabberwocky – Does a novelist lose a novel when its tone is impolite, because it is imprecisely not apace true conversational expectations?”

What if I rely on my power to shock instead of my power to build coherence from honest admission I rely on an ism of psychotic deceit?

My belief, I’d argue, if I’d answer myself unfiltered, is, (insert breathless comma splice right here), not always, but not never.

Have you forgotten the question? I have defects: do they matter?

Yes. And not at all. In some ways I crave the pivotal simple sentence. As I roll out the elastic, tasseled, anti-rapscallion all-are-welcome tone of voice, please note you should now know all of my novel’s mannerisms are an evoked and ennobled etiquette elaboration.
Yesterday morning I found an effeminately cursive-lettered handwritten note on my desk. It said, “You’re the Vlad The Impaler of attention vampires.”

We disrupt all indirect disrespect from seven invisible neon signs.

Church of the NFL; (I’m) Not Fucking Lying; it’s coming alive. This is what it is ever since I asked, unafraid, Was That What That Was?

((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((BLOSSOM))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))

You want to know how I thought I looked when I got here? Worth your time. Like when a journey up the Paramount Movies mountain jumps the list of your priorities – and you just go for it, for you and for me. A long novel says you’ll have to know how to work very hard. The novel’ll say, I’m here because this lovely universe expands only when you primarily make amazing major progress; as I provide a rebuild for the embouchure of your perspective. And if charismatic, the novel’ll also ask you, What happens when you forget to worry about your superstitions? Driving itself home, honing itself, and remembering that for now it wants you to remember its polyphonic and supreme kinds of music are forged only from how you take the text and set it aflow if you allow the motion, the novel says, You’ll know you also need never work again. Don’t slow down. I’m aiming, but, not aiming. Just drive slow.
What I’m not driving is always behind me and my father told me once that all Ferrari owners believe what’s behind you is not important. I can’t help but look over my shoulder, knowing what I’ve done on this road. Bass rumble thunder thumps up the block. One of my demons is a German man without a mouth he can use how he wants in a black matte Volkswagen Passat. Murdered out. Black tints. Black rims. Eight cylinders. Dark plastic film laid over the rear license plate numbers.
The entirety of Freemasonville’s nexus and plexus of electricity is constantly cutting off and on. And internet outages are causing outrage online. Everything electric is ironically flaring and dying and surging.

The social performance of a modern writer is most concerned in the tailoring of the ambition of the private person so the public audible proof doesn’t repel what the polished musical prose instills in memory.

What does your drive best resemble? Is it a kind of good karma? Or like my own? My drive is more than less an old moonshinerunner’s circuit. A jaunt I’m taking at triple-digit velocities for undisclosed cash sums. Traveling by way of slashing through deep South Caroline country, cutting whole hours in half in multiple hundred mile bursts. The jag burning rubber only to decelerate before I’m over the line then overtaking sluggish ant lines of traffic behind logging trucks on crisp two-lane roads bisecting National Forest territory populated by the thickest of thickset woods studded with mansions featuring cream-colored columns and elaborate transom windows and haint blue doors defiantly dominating endless driveways of grit and the ivory dust of gray gravel underneath the alabaster splotched poker chip chunks of sun between cavernous Oak tree tunnels that my vantages’ velocity’ll carve into slurred chevrons – when I whip and race away from plantation to small town to waterline in sparse counties without one tiny bar of reliable cell phone reception. What am I driving? Lowered, gamboling ground-dweller, a growling Rottweiler. Snarls like this thick wheel’d and big tire’d thing wants to hurt you from the only one place it cannot hurt you; if you can remain where you are; know you’re not unable to stand your ground, and stay unblemished. We’re not following rules very well and I hope you have enough to follow along even though we’re way out of line. We work until the buzz ebbs, and if we’re out of time, we need a last minute wonder’s miracle when we’re coming in red hot and mostly blind from the deepest of deep left field.
I’m far less furiously self-condemning since I last left my old North Charleston home-front for this Charlestonian Freemasonville.
Tonight I’ll touch a terrific freedom when terrifying tones take apart my harmonies then brush my fingers back into balled fists. In the personal violence of directing my discipline, I lift off the reluctance to rage, and I unloose a lack of masquerade as I parcel out from onyx knuckle-sized divots in between my brows a prose wherein I can show you a time when there was one similar but never the same acid bright dream I loved to live again and again; a phantasmagoria where I stood not alone but isolated on high and out on a cliffside and I curl-hop chucked, hurled, gunned a set of four or five found lukewarm leftover cans of a Rainier Beer box over the heads of psychedelically saturated sand dune dwellers until they splashed into the Snake River. Cold clarity for every can. Every can wore a far-off and fleet and sparrow-like shadow on the mellow yellow dunes. To me they were each one, suddenly that of a spearhead, arrowhead, manmade meteorite. From above I made forceful suggestions, physical demands, on this thing traveling some one hundred yards. It was at least as lawless as one’s lost mind, before my friend, fired up by his own identically hallucinatory groundswell, waded out, and scudded, and doggie-paddled to precisely near where my buoyant intoxications resurfaced. What is this? A tower moment? A Frank Lloyd Wright skyscraper? Wright had dauntless plans for several skyscrapers but never got out of an old household mindset.
You exist on the margins. You excuse an existence on the margins. You exercise your right to reconfigure existence so it suits your preferred margins when your existence is gained through the decisions you make in between the margins. Then you repeat these marginally improving tactics tirelessly until you can go from armchair to starting quarterback. Who productively proactively self-sabotages? Who sacrifices good graces by tarnishing nearly every single potentially promising academic and professional prospect with unrequited hyperbolic aggression in an effort to ensure they have no choice but to have nothing but good reason for chasing what they’ve in mind no matter the defenses laid before them? Bold, honest transgressors, both of them; the NFL Quarterback that refuses to quit to coach; the novelist that refuses to quit to screenwrite. Honest transgressors are preternaturally aggressive for good reason: they can’t help it. They’re showing all y’all blind spots until all this adds up. Tom Brady has not thrown a single interception in a tie game after the third quarter in regulation or any overtime in over one entire decade, which says, Some superior states of mind exist only because they say so.
IYKYK means If You Know You Know. And so far in this novel you’ve known of Grace Knox and Ozzie Merckle because I believe Ozzie Merckle drove Grace Knox to the edge of the cliffside, but she drove herself over the edge, even though everyone says she’d never go that far to get a good story out of herself. Her family, Mel Knox, friends, Mia Malone, and Ozzie’s friends, King Charlemagne and Gunner Green, the four - besides Mel Knox, a bartender at The Mermaid, but a great writer in her own way - are all part of the intense and often one on one classes I instruct as the Freemasonville Writer in Residence. They tell me that there is no way Ozzie did this to Grace Knox, so as a group we don’t know what to believe, is what we have to say in our silences so Grace Knox can resume these classes with us, even though she’s worked exclusively in a remote setting since the evening everything happened. It’s an unremarkably normalized weird fact. And it absolutely unearths the dark side of a writerly collective’s IYKYK. The promise of this dark underworldly truth has been my daily gateway into my Second City. My Second City is a concept I’ve made come to more visceral life than I ever thought possible, until this fiction I wrote changed my life forever.
In the South - not owning one’s shadiness is seen as an unseemly shame. An unseemly shame, perpetrated by an unhumble spirit, which, as a naked factoid, doesn’t add up at all - which all y’all’ll find makes perfect senselessness blend together sensibly, since everyone is in the tribe once one sincerely seems like they love believing in this serenity. Disrespecting any group’s only opinion disrupts its unified conjecture. I know I’ve always only arrived at great moments of colossal sea-change. I don’t come across as anything but intolerably, ruefully, pridefully rude if and when I finally reveal to all y’all what all y’all know all y’all don’t want to know all y’all love to do with our freshly starfire’d souls in this refreshed South: should one ever even once act untenably unrepentant after one’s been accused of toting aggressive hope for better ideas or compassionate idylls; or any sliver of imagination so bright it’s without hesitation labeled, clearly, the wrong fresh type of variety? Then the soul that has set out to finish finding what works by cutting their teeth on the public’s diamond and gem and jewel encrusted opinions, the one speaking because they’ve said they know they should, the one showing all y’all their true yet not-already-approved-psychic muscle of the universe in creation behind their more masked mug, this is the one that’ll next then always get set up to be brought back down. Brought back down to some comprehensibly imaginable yet desultory sizing just so the verifiably dimwitted can append an incorrect, “This-idea-is-not-that-new-after-all,” blanket statement with the further incorrect self-acceptance-ing phrase, “That’s it? That’s nothing. I can do that.”
With all due respect, we’re stealing back our blatant disrespect to set you up for what seven invisible neon signs you know you deserve. Of course you’ll fight back, and you’ll want to prevaricate, you’ll find it too easy to again begin carrying on in the caricature of acceptability; and this’ll happen in your standardized collective imagination how? By the hive-mind all y’all’ve subscribed to remarking that what stands behind the newer and maybe much better idea deserves the undesirable soul’s ultimate dissevering dismissal: being called out for dishonest shadiness. “Don’t lie to me about lying to me,” says what happens privately under the Spanish Moss of our favorite shade tree is outright not openly fit for any respectable public consumption, though if this happens it really says, “We want what works for us to win to write like it sounds like it’s the only one way to win because there’s no other option but our power.”
The currently powerful want all y’all to misunderstand why they’re projecting what you are not from the precise location of what they are at their worst - until they’ve completely run roughshod over and onto and on top of what you say you are; because the pure truth knows this much: the magic is in making your madness mean something more than what meets the bloodshot eye of the unseeing spearheading barb when one’s work is torpedoed by dishonorably sardonically subsonic accusations of, “The Mystical Project.” This is the Mystical Project? Cynically, yes, a project, before considering the black budget I’ve been afforded by The Institution’s unseen benefactors. This is nothing but what belief can bring through body and mind. This is what happens when time proves protecting one’s prophetic estheticism is a vital and ritual blood-letting masquerading as a contact sport. The powerful complain how everyone is to blame but the source of the prime pillory. They’ll rationalize batty bullshit by saying, “Everyone here is taking shots.” Shooters gotta shoot when our double meanings may mean one is best defined by personal tones of voice. You may learn what’s declared in, “You’re killing me,” signs both our zeitgeist and my zodiacs with a sportswriting truth, “You have to want to say you want to play ball to have some sort of say.”
Grace Knox texts me, “You think none of us consistently sees your constant use of Southern as euphemism for subconscious fakery?”
Does the South sincerely fake a subconscious thoughtful faith?
I respond, “I’ve since the summer learned best weaponries might come alive in your life from my not ceding your doltish personal dig any reflexive acrimony that’d reveal what I’ve allowed to damage my heart.”
Grace says, “Didn’t you just do that by telling me this though?”
I respond, “How’s your writing? What are you working on?”
Energy and enthusiasm always becomes authority and expertise. But it’s more than annoying to a reading public if yours won’t fall in line with their incorrectly arranged expression of their subjective universe. Some of the worst people you’ll ever meet’ll do everything in their power to make everything out of your mouth a sick and twisted kind of chance for your change by their influential hand and mind and style. They will attempt to kill your pride and joy. To read their mind is to hear how they want to hate your confidence enough to falsely assess and then encircle the mirage of their projections of your psychic wounds - so they sell you on a conversation featuring an emotional death trap; often it’s a sort of something for which they can provide artful dismissal of and a disservice to your desires; which are just like theirs, differently angled.
Grace says, “My latest pages are proving every elite TikTok girl’s makeup now looks like the optical optimization of Siri’s sonic crispness. Unnatural to be this naturally flawless; the inertial torquing toward the bland; it’s like the grotesque contortions of the popular TikTok girl star’s immaculately taciturn facial expression are signaling, between gross and tepid patterns, that they’ve broken new ground once they’ve made the once famous baby tiger maquillage look circusy. Popular dominance forces informal emotional forms into the realm of formal discipline. The next new ways of beauty want to dynamite our alternative creative dominions if they might only catch the traction of intense attraction - then repeat this dominance in another cycle in our lives later on. I show how dopamine is both destruction and divine. The method of managing messages we send to manufacture originality’s fonts? No, I’m writing to prove dopamine is better dispensed in minikin domino jots.”
I don’t say, “So definitely not working desperately hard to prove you’re far more than another pretty face.” And I also don’t say, “If you data dump your memory retention systems on me for show by default? Then I know within our current conversation, you’re not present in your presentation. But I’m more sure you’re imperfect too; and possibly sure you fear me; and entirely sure you’re afraid of my contradictory opinion. I’d like to imply you’re not the least bit bothersome. So don’t worry, this makes me look deeper for the evil underpinning things that’ll allow me to love you stronger than your fierce addiction to your reservoirs of fear.” ADHD’ll’ve one bouncing through several optionable responses before speech snags the attention span long enough for one’s actually investing enough deliberate effort to say something. And so what then I tell Grace Knox is, “The novelist is expert and master at courting disaster only they might avert. Ask when you’ll really know you’ll be done proving yourself to the false sympathizing demanded by your terrorizing yet lesser evils?”
Grace Knox texts back fast, “You’re saying that because you think it’ll show me more of my own motivation to my mind by my wondering, ‘Why?’ what you’ve said’s winning and relevant and wise?”
Grace Knox double texts me, “Why’re you addicted to the alien opinion of the outsider’s perspective’s illusorily unassailable position?”
Grace Knox triple texts me, “You only want to throw haymakers. You don’t have normal conversations with any of us.”
Grace Knox quadruple texts me, “You’re a heavyweight now? So you can’t connect with ordinary people the way you once did before?”
Ah. Grace Knox stays ready to throw big Southern suckerpunches.
I respond, “I should ask you to reconsider why I would ask you - if this were more cordial - why you think you’re saying all of that to me?”
Despite my road’s exotically monotonous conditions I know I want my writing to more than say it is best I remain rapaciously enamored with integrating all seven intelligently embellished invisible neon signs; strictly because I want to show and prove to you why my proving the things I’ve brought along for you to see in my written work’ll work well; that I’m sure I’m not too arrogantly convinced they’re worth your continuously consciously contributed effort. If this is done right, you’ll have faith you have to trust my route-running from the first. Since if I’m lighting your entire way to and in through a personal place of utopian underworld, where I can see the big bright things on the other side you don’t see yet. Then, overnight? We build brighter days. And in so doing, I’ll unmoor all of your major symptoms from this fresh hell to give them a vast repurposing in the vacuum of space you’ve uncovered for this novel. I’m more soberingly critical of my toxicities if I must bring them into all our attention. By keeping them alive, aflame - and making their guts, grit, go from grunge to glamor? I’ll show you how you’ll make your underlying elements appear bright, shimmering so they’re like excelsior. Lines only jump-start like moxie-fueled optical lions for you if surging through your dark dank blank spaces you’ve flooded with elixir to raze new tundras until they yield sensationally luscious, thundering harvests.
If I’m drinking with all y’all, and I lose conversational warmth, I’ll often mostly be admonished or accused of sounding very annoyed. And then I’ll sound more annoyed when I say I know I don’t sound annoyed. However, I’ll usually next openly admit in this same exchange, I’ll or I’d really sound annoyed if and when I cannot - here and now or then and there - sincerely know nor tell whether or not all y’all’re reading into what I’ve already earlier signaled, audiblized: the thing, my thing, what I’ve always wanted to do; and what I want to begin launching downfield.
I want to unlock the chasms of our prehistorical speech patterns in the present tense of our patronage of each other - so then all the truly self-assigned irreversibly important details of all the things you’ve and I’ve imprinted onto our entertainment-receptive minds throughout the day are at least to and for y’all and me somewhat more easily accessible.
All y’all and I already know we want unfettered access to an always way too over-mindful type of thoughtful association for us to leave ignored, if and when, y’all or I think y’all’ve or I’ve something important to y’all and me to say and to contribute to y’all; because I’ve on hand an ocean of euphoric enthusiasm I’ve always wanted to give away freely.
Money for nothing, lyrics freed, if ever I’ve added the right kind of personality-unlocking-drinking to any type of time we spend in this life when or where I’ve learned of another one of my soul’s more promising and or professionally competitive over-thinking exploits? Or if I’ve added drinking on or into any of our moments or times when I’ve almost always also often overnight found more than a lifetime’s worth of enraptured preparation readied for any newfound passionate way to build community out of the blue; a one certain way of being I’ve felt was much the same as some kind of reward for my always remaining on the lookout to go after or attack or hunt for vulnerably subjective ego roots to rip away from the false or too high in my sporting commentary produced confidence? Just so I could get to my soul’s meeting all y’all’s?
When I’ve found some wonderful wild chance to do something correct? I might briskly sidestep my aggression to then go out of my way to, down in The Mermaid basement, say or begin with, “Our oceans boast both tremendously deserted conditions and mammoth junglings.”
Alright. What does this mean? And how do you ask, What do you want what you mean to mean inside a mind you’ve newly now met with here, that’s maybe bearing far less of what you really meant to be understated yet understood about what you want this whole thing to mean? Or is any mind especially hesitant since suggesting you weren’t sure you were safe saying what sage thing you wanted freely expressed?
If I say, “Our oceans boast both tremendously deserted conditions and mammoth junglings.” Or, “I love the emotional gunplay of the diabolically theatrical dynamic range within the NFL’s script this season.” Then this common-language-enough, not entirely idiomatic trope-type of comment’ll deliberately overexpose an active internal wish of mine. A wish of mine I intuit I’ve projected onto and matched with what I think you’ve simultaneously hoisted up for my now witnessing of the activation of a wide-open increasingly casual conversational flow; and its signal is what’ll usually come aflare right before I know at once I wish I’d instead first committed to openly admitting I love unorthodox conversation when it comes from a collection of thought I contributed toward to blur the lines between my personality’s delineations and the molds I’ve made of my more than blurred tablemates’ souls, when, for the moment - or maybe not right now I won’t but I could overburden you with my energetic itch to go overboard, yet, when I do speak up, it more often than not goes like, “When I’m out on the high seas of my mind’s versions of these nights. When I’m riding on one hell of a boat load’s hull of wave-crushing confidence? I’ll not constantly nor even ever just once get caught acting far too nonchalant out amidst copiously overpowering emotional swells. When dozens of way too many two-way wave breaks’ll splash over the prow of my nose like it’s my free-falling or destabilized slow-bounding bow’s bashing down in between this night’s higher and sacred chakral rhythms; and I can’t exactly tell all y’all how I know I know these dark oceans we harbor so well, but I can assure any and all on board with me, that no matter what aquatic action happens out here? Reshaping the flow of everything tomorrow’ll make me a master of what I want of what I think matters to really mean in all of my emotionally re-stabilizing work’s better fundamentals; because I can guarantee you, I can, every night embrace my mind in this confidence.”
At work in words and within any set of contextual sleeves I can don any stance, any standing, any adaptation. I prefer more often than not, suave lapels, the dark and darkening or even a-so-increasingly-rich-crimson-it’s-practially-painted-black-in-any-low-lights-sports jacket. No matter what I think, nor whatever I know about a moment I’m in? I can do the thing, that thing, this thing, my thing, I can turn it all on, then become your favorite personably persuasively charming sportswriter.
I can show you I can say how I can and will become what you want, when I say, I can be your thing too, your one shimmering and shining example of the rules more elegantly bended to strip all y’all of your undue and droll straightjacket etiquettes. In living or acting so bold, like this, during this wild time last year, I slowly stopped getting away with only being accused by detractors of wonderfully glossing over all facets of my dealings with others more than obliviously pride-hammered. With discontent embroiling my stray remarks, displeased with my disease of disliking humdrum diatribe, I found myself too guilty of gathering my gratuitous self-confidence from only my special form of sportswriting success. I was losing the curious wish and innate capacity for connecting with the stories others wanted to tell about themselves.
Once I’d a swashbuckling dignity follow me in my sportswriter’s thoughts everywhere. It made me embolden the enlarged lines of my broad shoulders, and I’d adopted an Atlasianic self-identity by default. I made it seem, too, in the way I spoke to myself, I could portray the gift of this liveliness to all others whenever, wherever, but then make it look natural like its endearing essence was what I’d been dealt from the start. If asked about it, I’d say, “It’s always been there, this gift. I can’t turn it off. It just happens.” My first hot streak of sportswriting successes, my point of pride, became all I wanted to have people ask me about so I could tell every person my fascinating war stories anywhere I’d tread; because then I could easily back up my best barrage of boasts with the boost of loving what hot take drunk insight I could broadcast and predict for any person game enough to actually Google my name after I’d sardonically suggest that if they didn’t believe in my prowess, they ought to, “Google me.” I wore out what I had had to back me up, storm clouds of clout. Whenever I’d flagellate outside projections of doubt cast upon my preferred personal legend’s preprepared cloudbursts? I’d haul out an effortlessly accessible piece of pride-induction I whipped out to more than wow doubters. Like it was a thick Glock, I wielded one thing above all else, the equalizer, the ego-checking, exceptionally well-aged and point for point perfect NFL twenty twenty regular seasons’ preseason playoffs seeding prediction I’d composed one feverish August evening. This was byproduct of one of those one-off Franz Kafkaesque ten hour bursts wherein he produced some of his finest short literature. This one best and brightest thing I’d always loved stashing under my belt, attached to my name, was a prized piece wherein I’d crafted a flawlessly well-argued, well-reasoned set of forty four cogent published paragraphs. Forty four paragraphs anyone could read through. These were golden bricks, a pathway to prominence. In them I’d powerfully laid down a resplendent guide to an exactly correct description of what a one through seven seeding path in the AFC and NFC would look like by the middle of January in time for the NFL playoffs to get underway. Fourteen shots called, an ace, all the way from the deep dog days of August, very long before the second half of the regular season began. Any perfect forty four paragraph playoff prediction piece is an actually and nearly impossible feat most NFL seasons; especially because one cannot typically anticipate most devastating season-ending injuries, like former Clemson star, Cortez Cabellero’s off-season fiasco, that’ll take a contender from the top of the pile to the front of the NFL Draft. Yet this one particular high water mark, this powerhouse piece published under my name, was what one big thing finally made my name, “My Name.”
According to my digital editor, my prestigious forty four paragraph piece was our site’s single best web-traffic magnetizing piece that entire NFL season. Week after week, what I’d written for the underground’s entertainment, and to the delight of our unique squad, looked more and more the likely truly proof-positive that my entire current production of NFL prediction theater was purely correct precognition; a long-winded opinion comprised of such pristine pattern recognition, one could argue my thoughtfulnesses were on par with this specific NFL season’s plans made by the sacred souls sitting in the Lotus position in the Church of the NFL’s primary writer’s room. Not only was it fun for anyone to read, but I’d predicted every single faint and cursory and minute turn of events leading up to and then throughout the entire playoffs. Eventually viral sports TikTokers referenced my name as synonymous with insider’s information. My name was, more, every day, “My Name.” The sound I’d heard in reference to myself most in my life would never only be what one would want to grunt to get my attention. No. No not now - not anymore. No - now my name was a password for the gate-keeper’d parts of our modern sportswriting’s underground America; a pop-cultural legend; one well known because I couldn’t have been more spot-on long before the odd months leading up to then eventually throughout the strange time it took for Tom Brady and Patrick Mahomes to meet in Tampa Bay for an exorbitantly oddball blowout game of a Super Bowl.
So what to make of this then? To go with my newly memorialized and certifiably clairvoyant confidence boost? I learned what popularity looks like applied to the talented gesture. Like how most TikTok Tarot readers come across uncommonly lullabyllic? The best part of this ultra weird twenty twenty regular season was that when paired with a few negligible though unexpected extra monetary bonuses from my digital editor, I more than once nightly out in bars and restaurants throughout Charleston, South Carolina, seemingly got to do my thing and perform my talents to even greater acclaim. Intermittently I was told of my gift’s divine use for another’s life, what I did and what I was doing was what was made when I made meaning out of what I meant to someone else, and thus I got to get my hands on tips in the form of free shots upon free shots; and I had, basically, passed to me as fast as I could down the suds, boatloads of comped beers and bountiful IPAs at all my local dive bars. It wasn’t a hustle per se, but usually someone would braggadociously speak of my giftedness, and say I could right here, now like Tony Romo, call out the correct outcome of four or five offensive sequences in a row - or even predict the final score of each half of any game. Disbelievers would openly disagree with my hot take then come to adore me while playfully observing me perform a play for play near-perfect prediction for every specific offensive action and nail each down and distance’s answer during any live footballing televisual - college or professional. I could not not see where the ball was going nor not not be there by my new fans’ side to explain exactly why some decisions were inevitable but only a fraction or a portion of them were wise and good or unfortunately poor and copiously too predictably short-sighted. Then to win some now suspicious or incredulous crowd away from believing or suspecting I loved being this kind of know-it-all more for the attention it earned me than anything else? I could then also rely on, instead of giving myself credit, especially when and or if an offensive play was blown up by an elite defense, saying something along the lines of, “Well if I could see this coming? What makes y’all think professionals didn’t already know?” to then affect a stunningly popularizing masking effect for my cocksure personality. Ambition, confidence, showmanship: in most sportswriting, they’re the same as talent. This was where my new barfly friends would turn into sports fans and many would become a sportswriter’s closest compadre on the spot. I couldn’t get enough and it went on like this for months as everyone I met would offer and then would continue to cover until most nights they nearly bought for my unrelenting thirst, all of or close to every one of my drinks. So I’d go out on multiple, consecutive nights in a row, without cash or card. And on more than one occasion, I sat down then scratched out on some randomly damp and open and folded maroon cocktail napkin in big bold black sharpie letters, the abbreviated team names of the way each week to win for any person’s small or large or personal online sports betting book. And I’d string out, purely just based on establishing the best occam’s razor’s path for my personal playoff predictions, and at one point for seven weeks in a row in the middle of the twenty twenty NFL regular season, my own advice for an unblemished twelve-game-deep betting parlay; and I later also wound up taking home full honors for winning one popular dive bar’s every NFL playoff round’s overall highest correct wining percentage; a victory based on picking the closest final score of each game’s total points, not necessarily the outcome, which I’d usually nailed down too.
From this ensorcelling August-September through January then on in through February twenty twenty one and into Spring, onwards, I felt, nearly, nonsensically, optimistically, myopically, invincibly too sure I could eternally feel I’d always forever foresee the one subtle way every NFL story line’d shake out. Then in fall twenty twenty one I told all and sundry, I foresaw the Seattle Seahawks bouncing back from a fluke of a rough start, following an overtime loss at home to the Tennessee Titans.
All North American Football Gods laughed at my confident hot take. I’ll tell all y’all but all y’all know you know that no one of us could have foreseen what happened in the NFL in Seattle in twenty twenty one and early twenty twenty two. Back then no one wanted to admit to what was happening because no one could look at what it was, and then think that what this was was what would happen for the entire season.
Betraying skeptical and scientific wisdom, like a magnetic pole shift, Russell Wilson’s reigning NFC West Division Champions, the twenty twenty one Seattle Seahawks, played not only obviously and awfully beneath their talent level, as consistently poor wet-paper-bag-type-defensive performances and frightfully bad offense punctuated the beginning of their new campaign, the Hawks looked like a cluelessly embarrassing discombobulation of lukewarm self-defeat and wretched mightlessness - a dumfounding dud instead of what we all thought we’d get: the next iteration of the first half of the twenty twenty regular season’s very best passing touchdown scoring machine in all Seahawks history, when Russell Wilson threw for six points twenty eight times in eight games, throwing for two thousand five hundred forty one yards, completing seventy one percent of his two hundred ninety seven pass attempts. And yet? The twenty twenty one Seattle Seahawks became a staggeringly ensouring flub of constant embarrassment for every expert that’d believed in their greater than bleak Super Bowl chances publicly.
And at my local dive bars, I still performed pro-Seahawks Hot Takes. I was, The Guy, remember? The One Guy, right? Last season, I saw through all the game’s story lines so well it was like I’d written them for the Church of the NFL myself.
I yammered, capitulated constantly, and I argued with reality. I argued with everyone I knew, argued with way too many good and kind folks I’d never meet out again. And argued just so I could vaingloriously, socially, outline why my insights meant more than what was real to the rest of the room’s version of every NFL Sunday. Argued so even the stubborn bartenders’ve to agree with my points. Voraciously argued my side so I’d sidestep dubious ritual: performing self-esteem reductions for everyone to see I could suffer reality. Arguing because I wanted to evade ignominiously admitting, I was obviously way far beyond way wrong.
Perceptions of guaranteed revenge are amplified within some great pieces of art whenever the work steps out of its own shadow, when the acknowledged shadow insists the triumph of the raging artist in the work is in their art’s beyond all reasonable doubt downright proving the soul of the artist knows one of its primary justifications for its thriving life, receiving your undivided attention, is an ironic untrustworthyness of truth, that at the very least the meshed souls know their inner child has survived until now, because at least the shadow of the child has grown out a symphonic subjective universe in concert with the adult to not become something acceptably yet devastatingly uninteresting. (And so here it is.) Russell Wilson used to have and play with a gigantic chip on his shoulder. Wilson’s style of play was wildly clever, constantly recreating itself every time he scrambled out of the pocket, improvising sideline to sideline to forge the very space he needed for throwing all or nearly every one of his bulleting air-dropped dimes downfield. And it made him the kind of kid you could root for easily, a showman version of the acrobatic athletic superstar poster boy, a guy who deserved his canvas to paint out every screamingly bewildering victory. Yet within eighteen long weeks during the twenty twenty one regular season, every diehard, hyperactive, ordinary, passing football fan, every halfway conscious coherent football observer, then every professional football writer I knew? All saw exactly what I didn’t want to bear, what I couldn’t and wouldn’t write about, what I couldn’t see occurring even when I watched exactly what failures I couldn’t predict throughout any of my preseason pieces on the Hawks when they unfolded in real time. Russell Wilson began conserving himself, stopped leaving everything on the field, didn’t create the madness that made his talent mean something. Once Wilson stopped scrambling the Hawks stopped gaining first downs and scoring easy points. It was horrifying - because it was boring. It was appalling - because it was the deliberate body-saving ego death of the boy that brought a Super Bowl to Seattle. It was morose, moribund manhood. It seemed a thing the Football Gods had served Seattle cold. Every errant pass and quarterback sack added to the tentacular menace of what terrible thing came lurching at the Seahawks Nation seven ways from Sunday. As the twenty twenty one Seattle Seahawks went from elite wing’d cast of All-Pro raptors to a squadron of squashed feathers and floating mini beefy bits for hungry division rival sea urchins and bottom-feeder visiting team barnacle cirri, consistent obliteration lorded over Hawks Nation in full maelstrom’d force for what felt like months on end; because it was exactly that; tragedy matching the death brought on by winter provoking us from inset our glowing emerald emblazoned screens. It was a vivid warning sign, and the proof of one unacceptably demanding-to-be-accepted reality for all the sportswriter voices in my thought stream; a melody repeating itself like the drums in Boléro: not one of us should ever think we’ll ever know everything about the NFL.
A mystifying morality tale. The takedown of a self-described king of his own kind. It showed Hawks Nation what in hindsight all had to admit was what happens when a player’s complexion reads selfishness, while professionally playing the ultimate team sport; it showed us what happens when a spite-filled monstrously melodramatic man must face all he’s set in motion no matter the credit due to him after seven Pro Bowl appearances. This was the morbid machination of realizing how a sporting life can mirror and can and will usher in from the ground up the copious repercussions of one acting far too grandiose for one’s shoes.
After the twenty twenty one Russell Wilson led Seattle Seahawks suffered the buzzsaw of what seemed like every national sports media member embarrassingly undressing their talents amidst the ongoing local Hawks Nation, “Let’s just blow it up and commit to rebuilding,” blowback during their superstar player’s horrifying self-immolation? When all the carnage seemed more than proof positive a prolific and entire era was over? When the Seattle Seahawks’ passing record king’s dome all but imploded under the heft of his ego’s self-inflicted poor decision making? I remembered how every week I thought Wilson’d play his way through all adversity toward some kind of victory. And I’m sure Wilson also thought he’d find a way to win every game, too, if he could somehow now improve his new style, by developing a knack for relying on the minimalism of not scrambling like a maximalist, finally turning into a perfect minimalist Peyton Manning pocket passer. But then countless rumors swirled, Wilson’s teammates argued a relentlessly positive attitude seemed to inspire them to give up on him, like Wilson was playing some trying-way-too-hard-to-be-your-real-dad-step-dad that thought he could win your love through sheer effort. Upon review, more, each game, it appeared Wilson was increasingly forced to play versus his opponent’s best eleven defenders, all alone. Really he didn’t compete well enough for the entire Seahawks football family because he couldn’t speak for them nor their best interests anymore. Once a forgivably dorky pro-Jesus-Tweet machine; Wilson invoked an atheism. And so soon he couldn’t cater to anyone, his best friend and mindset mentor died, and his confidence continued catastrophically cratering. Wilson’s once remarkably city-wide popularity plummeted. My blind respect for Wilson’s gamesmanship, and then what I thought I knew about the NFL’s elite passing talent intricacies, entirely evaporated. At times all Wilson’s winless failures were so horrendous, I secretly thought it looked like Wilson may have been paid to take an eighteen week long dive, told to flop, to fail on purpose, to fall on his face publicly. Not only was it fundamentally freakish, it was like mythical science fiction, it was as if the entire Puget Sound vanished behind the Strait of Juan de Fuca overnight, it was as if something that’d always been there, looked like it would always be there for the emerald city, was nowhere to be found.
The sports star diva’s personality is a misunderstood self-defense. It relies on blatant misunderstandings being highlighted by star players, like, “You guys cannot and do not know what I go through to play this game.” And this tends to come across in performance like a childhood playground antic that’s activated when it must become a genuflection of deflected blame against the sports diva’s more, most intense emotional capacities’ abuse by the sports stars’ perceptions of bullying bad actors. When sports star divas are accused of patent flaws, they often counter-attack, lambast all sportswriters assigned to cover them as selfish, like, “You just want to tear me down so you have a story to write about.” And sports divas usually try telling off critical sportswriters by accusing the sportswriters of twisting their words through deleting the context of their comments. Russell Wilson’s citywide sports media coverage didn’t know what to do with the twenty twenty one regular season’s flagrant failures, mostly because many sportswriters were publicly or in print completely unsure of Wilson’s motives, motives always compounded by what’d become an all-around exhaustingly demented mega narcissistic version of Russell Wilson-y positivity. Of course, before the twenty twenty one season began, there were too many obvious Russell-Wilson-doesn’t-want-to-be-a-Seahawk-anymore red flags and he’s-leaving-Seattle-for-another-team warning signs to describe and diagnose with often far too little or abbreviated explanation space reserved in every publication’s pages. So nothing Wilson said was misattributed could include all the clarifying context Wilson said was missing from the background of his comments. All said, though, after completely losing charge within the Seahawks locker room, the entire Seahawks Nation turned on Wilson. And in tragic concert, every now changed Hawk’s fan’s tune personally cited how Wilson had also within the last few years mostly burned just about every credible competitive advantage his coaches and offensive coordinators had devised for him from behind the game day scenes on the bench and up in the boxes above the Seattle sideline. Everyone and their brother remarked upon how prior to recent failures, and for months before the twenty twenty one NFL regular season kicked off, Wilson had persistently argued and openly admitted in every avenue of professional sports media, that he didn’t trust any current Seattle coach’s vision for the team’s success. He wanted more or all power to call plays from his prized Pro Bowler’s pocket spot. Sportswriters know the truth is that’s just not how plays are called in NFL games, unless the passer is literally Peyton Manning or Tom Brady. With no one really ever once on the same common knowledge play-calling page? It was no small wonder Russell Wilson’s twenty twenty one Hawks finished very far from postseason contention.
Yet since Russell Wilson’s Seattle Seahawks began the twenty twenty one season as potential Super Bowl contenders, twenty twenty two’s offseason diagnostics were capricious and complicated. Would Wilson ask to leave for a new team in twenty twenty two? With no apparent passion for his soon to be former team during all of the twenty twenty one season, did Wilson always have one foot out the door? Was that the plan all along? Some found it at least a little easier to blame one of Russell Wilson’s finger injuries, a ruptured tendon he suffered on his throwing hand in Week Five. The injured digit was a gripping finger vitally essential for having a good grasp on everything Wilson wished to distribute downfield. After the initial injury, he tried to play through the pain for several series, but no strong grip on the ball meant no great or any good grip on preventing the completely chaotic downfall of his team’s competitive chances. Right after Los Angeles Rams defensive superstar Aaron Donald’s blue and yellow ram-horned helmet crushed Russell Wilson’s finger, Wilson had surgery at a local Los Angeles hospital following the game. He also had his credibility-enhancing franchise record of consecutive games started for the Seattle Seahawks obliterated on the spot. An accursedly crushed finger, it became hindsight’s unexpected and crucial course changing element. It actually gave Wilson what he said he wanted during the twenty twenty one preseason, and later it became more or less the team’s final great motivation to fulfill his titanically toxic trade request. This was a minute emendation of every realistic expectation by way of dealing with a forgivably unpredictable thing. When the twenty twenty two preseason began in earnest, every sportswriter eventually kept coming back to the first openly disconcerting public discord, the fallout from twenty twenty one’s preseason, when Russell Wilson’d unloosed a pulpy spree of prissy sports media appearances featuring his infamous conversational positivity covering up a cavalcade of passive aggressive sniping that’d culminated with his current agent releasing Wilson’s five preferred trade destinations several months before the twenty twenty one season had began; and very, very long before Wilson’s finger crumbled; saying to the media, that if the Seahawks didn’t want to give him all the on-field control he claimed to have said he’d wanted for years and years, if the Seahawks wanted to move on from Wilson as their starting quarterback - an unthinkably poor choice to consider at the time - then they could. All of this unromantic and unflattering disinterestedness underscored a poorly aging tabloidically-quasi-soap-operatic-blame-game drama we also later learned was not any new news, but, actually, what Wilson’d allegedly fomented to use to fight with his coaches during every single Seahawks offensive coordinating meeting not going his way, every other week these tense meetings would come near to blows, this happened every single season after Wilson’s Seahawks won their lone Super Bowl.
All of these entangled neuroses were finally too foredooming and too surreal when twenty twenty one appeared to be a true season in hell for Russell Wilson. Playing out the rest of his contract, convinced of his great stature, it was like the North American Football Gods forced the NFL’s statistically, arguably, consistently best regular season quarterback of all time, who normally during every single game played like a freakishly reliable model of consistently high passing performance, to then, Talmudically, fail, fall, lose, and lose game after winnable game after easy-win game after prime time contest after division matchup after must-win-to-stay-in-the-playoff-hunt-showdown. Starting Week Two, but before twenty twenty one’s season ended, nearly one and all questioned everything we thought we knew about the average NFL team’s power dynamics. For starters, Is the quarterback really the most important position on the field? And, Are professional quarterbacks high salaried thieves if they’re playing in the last parts of their careers but telling everyone they’re still playing in the middle of their primes? Are NFL quarterbacks actually in charge on the field? Does it matter what QBs say they see? The second most successful NFL team of the last decade, measured by combined winning percentage, plummeted into not only bland mediocrity but a complete and total non-competitive oblivion. In twenty twenty two all was settled, Russell Wilson finally departed the Seattle Seahawks for the Denver Broncos in a blockbusting megatrade.
Whatever resembles resentment can be personally rejected and called fearfully embittered deceitfulness whenever one’s best behaviors meet with a more than careful attentiveness in action, an unconditional love of an emotionally empowered attention to detail so exquisitely an empathetic set of soulful excisions it is like one has here, there, forward, turned toward what turns one into the person one knows when and or were one to meet what one could always respect, in an effort to ensure you can ask after the production of your passions, Really? Is this your truth? Is this the best thing that you can be for you and for me as well? Do I wonder, in this writing, whether or not you’ve arrived, and taken a place in a position from where I can work with all y’all? Or do I consider, and far too often tend to ignore, if you haven’t yet learned how true this whole yarn really is? Especially, now, since I’ve taken care of and have cared enough to present what I share as what’s entirely sincere, without insisting my work may mean what I make makes me superior to all y’all’s ill-wishing thoughts of me in my reality? Whenever I ask after the reality in your mind’s interpretation of this fiction - does that mean what I’m after’s something more, when I’ve ascended to a space or station beyond only taking a chance at catching a wild refrain in the act of delighting all y’all in the charisma of captivation every chance I can get? If I’m intentionally asking you to foreshadow toward a distant time, within a subjective history you cannot anticipate, when and where your stylishness turns your immaturities into wondrous antiquation, where, when slotted into bright lines, you can turn around and sell off, like you wield the holy willpower of the neuxson of the neon salesman’s traveling case, would all y’all choose to define your supposedly serious thoughts and overtly biased contextual preferences as the shortcomings of what pattern of bluffs we uncover in all Southern Gothic Fiction? Like, I could and I should tell all y’all now once and for all, “It ain’t all that bad living down here in the Sun Belt, y’all.” Does this sound like the sure-handed devilish soothsaying of a soul cutting a more dapper silhouette in his very best black sports jacket? Would all y’all feel offended if I asked you to know whether or not what about what’s within and where within your thoughts all y’all are is that of which matters the most for not wishfully but accurately depicting your long-standing truth in posterity? Are these circles too large, these cycles too long, words too big? What about the truth do all y’all know’s understood by everyone else? Who says, Mercy’s Overrated? What holds up in hard-earned hindsight are the hard-pressed and compression of memories of the exaggerated emotional spaces inside every fluent glossy televisual’s elan. You’re typing this into the digitalization of your mind. And, true, too, is knowing all the things I think I know about the NFL’s story - all of that - is completely different now. All facts of my fiction are hardly what I thought about them at first, as well as not close to what I first thought I thought about fiction at thirty two years old - and yet?
Of all of what I can show all y’all I do know now about the abrupt change in pace, turn of phrase, game-changing play, the relentlessly breathless paragraph break, and breakaway from the action that adds verification to my claim of fringe placement and invaluable outsider insight in the mythic that is my hot take on a modern Church of the NFL? I can share five mind and life-saving things you’ll want to have on hand. First, most veteran professional sports media personalities believe you don’t want to think about how you might not know the complete success of their best work emerges when you’ve frictionlessly forgotten what night of the week it is when you see them hustling hard. Second, all the NFL’s universe, the entire NFL’s everything, can and will without warning act as if it thinks you want it to think it has but only several solid transformational options near each regular season’s halfway point. Then the NFL wants to flip scripts and to commit to a consistent tumult; it wants to upend itself. When the NFL is in its essence? It is at its very best unmercifully immersed in a most unruly and unpredictable change. Third, every NFL game should eventually and incrementally show the audience how each audience member should well know by now that within every swift whisper-thin span of every rollercoastering regular season, everything you think and believe matters most to the larger game’s theories is only what matters to you, what matters most to your team, your nontrivial tribe; moreover, how all of this can then within one moment soon matter preposterously far more than it did at one time, or perhaps, just for today, it matters not at all. And that that’s what they mean by, “Well, that’s why they play the game.” Fourth, when multiplicitous in-game strategy realizations string otherwise extant, raw game condition observations together into fresh, new competitive wisdom? The stargazing of the strategizing’s realizations will slam into your sense of the game’s seminal rules - and slam into your mind from your blindside and change everything about the way you see everything. This change often does happen in the splitting between realities, in one moment. But sometimes change’ll only take place later on; still, though, no matter what, somehow sooner or later, when one believes their being exposed by another’s advantages to be a blessing? It is then that this turnover of what one’s got down, what they know they know, where one’s finally forced to learn once and for all, one must never stop reevaluating the way one works on or for one’s specific Sunday ritual. This is the biblical belief that marks out the magic in the rueful rituals of the armchair quarterbacking-only-to-lounge to recharge one’s more productive weekly economic rage. Finally, Fifth, the talismanic gold worth coveting inside the key phrase, “The game’s changed,” is more valuable to a person, when, personally, this person truly knows what they’re saying when they’re saying, “The game’s changed.” Because, “The game’s changed,” usually means you’re dramatically altering what you’re looking at in the game by adjusting how you’re looking at the life of your constant outside experience from inside the experience of the game. And, in saying,“The game’s changed,” you’re mostly describing a dramatic change in your life that’s very far away from the game played.
“The game’s changed,” is the only thing I think I could’ve said to myself yesterday that entirely meant what I meant to say. “The game’s changed,” came to life in a one-sided private conversation because the typical, daily, life-games I’m running have at once, indeed, irreversibly, completely changed. Only two odd long weeks ago after the day before yesterday, Freemasonville indulgently had on hand a greater communal joy in a sweltering sweater-less end of a Charleston Super Bowl Sunday. But then our Freemasonville weekend weather forecast flashed our folks some freshly devised and formidable fangs. We learned a dramatic and rapidly changing hurricane-like emergency could churn our collective chatter from gossip into communal doomsaying. We’ve gone from tossing out impossible improbabilities to analyzing what’s said to be a violent likelihood: meaning rich pieces of juicy valuable information do not threaten maiming only in the moment when they turn into fact. In truth, the unreal can and will be used against us when the unreal is just as real as soon as we’ve emphatically embraced the entire visceral reality pledged to us by the speaker. Our prevailing winds of critical opinion’ve been upended by a libation distributor’s not-so-informal think-tank. Not a cult, but their social game isn’t what you think it is either, they don’t want all y’all to know how ineffably wise they think they are for wishing all y’all play ball through completely forgetting what night of the week it is when all y’all see them hustling, and hard at work, their being, their presence, their making-it-look-easy, serving spirituality’s sensational surreal earthangelic elixirs under high pressure in a liquor-free sobriety.
Reading broadly and reading widely and reading deeply are three most useful novel reading and comprehension skills. But novel writing skills’ll turn insanity’s symptoms inside out, until your novel reading comprehension skills’ inverse functions are also way more than some useful set of skills when you personally read far too deep into everything that everyone has ever said to you and then read so deep into everything everyone has ever said to you that you think your reading is just about the only professional mind game never regularly highlighted on ESPN.
This evening Freemasonville’s nexus and plexus of continuously useful electricity will not stop constantly cutting off and on. I’ve old recognitions aflicker, their repetitions sparkling, I can’t stop noticing all recently reestablished prior patterns recurring, again, and then again, as again these internet outages only cause ever more outrage online. Since everything electric acts like it wants itself expressed in its expiration - ironically flaring and dying and surging, I admit to myself I’m more than distracted by not being as distracted as I think I should be while I’m doing more work on these new revisions.
Still with my screen brightness already greatly reduced, I notice the roundedness of the digits in the black battery graphic numbers sharpen into some unsaid significance when the leftover cordless battery percentage precipitously slips underneath half-full and falls to then below forty seven percent remaining. It was just at fifty eight percent, so I think the last line I’ll let slide for the time being’s better than good enough for now. And maybe later I won’t let it stand to read, “Reality’s conditions, ambivalent towards my disputatious willpower, suggest I could use a dose of divined agitation.” I want to make another attempt at it. This is the itch, the infinite. Yet I won’t go for it right now, I’m gassed, I’ll finally power down my MacBook. I begin telling myself I should transition way too early into some of the prior and preparatory work I’ll do to better prepare for the work Ozzie, Gunner, King and I’ll advance later on this evening to improve our sessions’ avaricious half-lives. I go grab my iPhone from inside the little locked silver lockbox I’ve left on the hard dark wooden bench in the hallway, sealed shut to eliminate vibrations, and temptation’s vibration, and all sound of siren song included, for times when I entirely force myself to want to work fully phone-distraction-free. I unlatch the chromium clasp and I flip off the dense slender lid. Post-extraction, I type then send a group text, “Remember your mind’s limitations are just mental blocks, and that since the mind is a physical thing, your barriers can be removed.”
King, Gunner and Ozzie and I know the aftershocks from our meetings of writerly mind-melding must make the measurements of these many varied and myriad madnesses mean more than what within our lonelinesses we’ve known we may know together. In our practice we have to pragmatically and practically goad ourselves to commit more of our minds than we might otherwise in an industrious effort to entrust each of us to at the right time tell our one personal story, one story at a time. Tonight, we’ve decided we’re using a shrewd plan comprised of King’s first plot instincts to game out our new windfall of intelligences. This is a strong, thoughtful, choice, because within the underground of King’s untethered imagination, we’ve agreed, first and foremost, we flat-out enjoy his unpredictable panache and pyretic style. Our collective choice says to and about our sessions’ tastes, we’ve said we’re more than glad to extoll in these private ceremonial choices King makes when he’s creating all our opulent consequential consecutive open-endednesses.
Our embrace of the embers of King’s imagination is on some level a clinching certification of King’s more ecstatic authority. We know why it’s wise we’re using what’s been made up for precisely what we’re ebulliently using, now, as well, because, this last Monday, King said, “We need far more information we already know we don’t know how to find. Ironies heat up the itch for this hard-won work. Ironies make us safer in some ways, since what we do find is that it is hard to believe why it seems way too easy to buy into the freakish fact, that our best collective bet to learn something valuable from this rendezvous is to send our literal biggest guy with the most well-known local name and famously powerful face inside an otherwise closed-door conclave sunk in the clandestine swamps of a conspiracy theory swap-meet slated for reverberating on the rufescent walls of The Mermaid’s basement.”
King’s spoken up without unfairly knowing he did so by knowing full well our preexisting desires for the use of his brand of persuasion. Our choice expounds upon the fact that we all now want King to safely infiltrate this Hurrication planning session because all of us also want to find ourselves attending an illustrious Hurricane party hosted by the Gala Crowd. One might hold boring broad-backed umbrellas in a real storm? Or double-fist their colorfully theatrical minikins inset the circles of a select upper echelon. We’ll have to see what all of the Hurrication planning entails, and then what that means, when he gets there, when King gets the down-low through correctly playing his elite high status.
The intensified depth of local hardship makes a mermaid out of struggle, the struggle to ask for help, the struggle that may even forever mean more for the Caroline transplant looking for what proof at least lends a little suggestion toward adjusting a former outsider’s mindset to next then take note or take the hint that the only true explanation for Southern loyalty or why older Southern culture gets bound up and threaded into the complex rhetoric of tradition and family and tribalism is primarily the persistent and prodigious obfuscation of every person’s torturous overexertion, extending beyond pre-established limits of intellectual and physical pain tolerance, eventually, literally, surpassing every threshold imaginable, until the staggeringly high degree of which, once one’s at least a little emotionally removed from the present experience, means it is easier to argue that the entire Caroline transplant’s region of perception relies entirely on the indefatigable power of an endless sunk-cost fallacy, there’s a social swamp spread out and extending over everything, Lowcountry. If there is a state of mind or motto for what makes a Caroline life its own version of the Deep South, then it is essentially this, “Enter our terradome and thrash eternal or all y’all get the fuck gone from here yesterday.” It’s like they want you to want what they want the stylish way the Carolina Gamecock General Sumter wanted his ferocious victory. And I like knowing I don’t know what’ll happen tonight, tomorrow, the following day, nor throughout the long weekend, though on some level I’ve still some inclinations toward several sensible predictions. I also know I don’t know what out of all of what we’ve said we want is what we really want. Or, how, since we’ve said this is what we do want? How this’ll work into what’s soon either a course of action that makes our minds work through either a kind of tandem match, or a collision of conduct and desire, in a clash with what we’ve so far said are the stated details of our reality. I know too I’m unsure why I’m prefiguratively procrastinating my actually figuring out what I’ll need to find out, like I think I’m far better off not knowing too much from some unassured jump. One thing I know for sure is that I’ll at least need some sort of MacBook battery charge leftover for rewriting what I’ve rewritten today, so I can work out what all rewriting I’ll want to work on tomorrow. And there is then this one other thing too, I plan to know I’ll know in the moment why I’ll rewrite everything again, or even, or rather, especially, if the power goes out, when I’m sure I’ll feel ready and able to act on what I need to do in order to redo this or that section, and go over it, go through it, give it the once-over, and go back through again, and once more, and then once again once more to then in more way than one far better design the mind-handle of these pages.
One line I don’t mind admitting I like is, “If it makes for a fine intellectual firearm acquisition, then getting a grip means more than paying enhanced and much closer attention.” And this one I’ve enjoyed looking at but still mostly distrust is, “A lot of this conflict is stuff that’s not your problem - just your distraction.” And since writers need to know what to do when, “You’ve made countless phenomena true by refining fine lines between your mindfully paranoid prognostications so they consistently blur with what will bisect all of your more meticulous perfectionisms.” My eyes freeze, and I slow way down, because Mia has texted me, “Perfection needs you to at least pretend it’s deeply flawed to get you out of its head. That’s why I don’t do the overwriting of detailed outlines of my novels before they’re written, since I’ve learned, through experience, heavy revision in one novel draft, once one’s vastly more improved rewritten novel’s arrived, can mean previous drafts were this newer novel’s true outline. It is an alchemically altered thing adjusted to gold.” I like this notion a lot. I enjoy Mia’s theories more than she knows, so I don’t say to her in response, “Now we know why all of or most of your considerably over-conscious crosshair’d points arrive unannounced. It’s like you want us to view your sharpening wit as this off-putting and very strange thing you’ve made manifest, only for us, in this instant, like you’d prefer to symbolize your spontaneous tongue as some inexplicable mud-orange boxcutter presented in a mindlessly unlikable Instagram post featuring no caption, but the brand name is bared, Sheffield, as in Gary, your favorite power-hitting baseball player, hands so fast at the plate he’s most famous for his bat waggling.” Since maybe I’m arguing everyone unconsciously has a favorite baseball team, because I’m sure even black boxes know where they’re coming from, in fact you have to know how to say where you’re coming from when a technology is literally invented to say what’s happening or what’s happened where it is coming from, left field or deep center or the right wing or whatever or otherwise. And if you lack a certain capacity for at all times labeling very well what you know you need said? Then the work in your writing may come across earnest but it is surely more of the same smarmy sing-song, an intolerable liability rife with self-serving shortcuts, the self-delineated chintzy limitations of the lines landing like pulled punches of what you’ll always want to just lie your way through without once growing stones enough you know you need for taking your final line through a chiseling cut upon lash upon slash that’ll eliminate the self-punishing and prefix’d aspiring from your bestseller’s schematic. Your shortcomings are worth identifying. Or at any rate that’s the idea. But since I’m gaining more and more sympathy for what Mia does, I won’t say to her that, “While she gave her life the gracelessness of too much true real world all at once, Oedipa Maas tried so hard to make all and every little thing within her more than mundane vista mean something, that she eventually drove everyone else she ran across acidically mad.” And it loved to happen so now I can avoid saying to Mia, “I wonder why the selfless self-congratulations always requires quixotic quibbling?” And since I’ll not want to unbecomingly admit to Mia, “I’ve before though somewhat less lately basically believed beer and weed and madness made my entire writing life vastly easier than outlining any of my novels ever did.” I’ll never concede to Mia, first, “Outlining your novel hands the plot of your destruction to versions of yourself outside your best interests.” Nor will I concede to Mia, second, “There’s no kind of ambiguous limit to the all-consuming ambition of my qualifying conditions’ delusory detonations amidst the ambulations I have manning my disaster crafting.” Therefore, if I can’t bring myself to crush Mia’s ideas by saying, “Daily it’s more imperative I’ve got to give all y’all everything, especially everything emotional, I’ve got to give it all, and give it to all y’all without expectation, just give it away so I might get back betwixt my glorious guttering gleam.” Then I should type out but I won’t send, “There’s a detailed electronic charge of neurotransmission within every word of our sentences. The collective colluding energy of these consecutive inflections’ll set in motion a spectacle of rotation. The rotation of these impossibly refulgent constellations’ll do for you a work of a kind above your mind. They’ll feel like they’ve come from what symphonic syntax you’d expect from your mastered form’s selfless roots, an unspoken voice below yours, it’s saying, ‘Of course, that’s how it is. Of course, that’s how this was always meant to be, it is actualized potential through your relentless revisions.’”
The heroic heartfelt charisma of a greater fool’s confidence is all yours for the idiotic taking. Your divine gifts know through their timely storied turns from lessons in your lives before this one on your hands, right now, that they must only arrive when they can’t be used against you. They’ll become more usefully clear when all y’all consider bigger questions correctly. Initially, try asking, of what among your imagination answers the very best way when you’re tasked with deciphering the logic of making hard decisions, tough choices? Do all y’all choose the steps of rigorous simplicities? Or reach afar for more ambiguous infinities?
Note that the pentimenti of these arising processes are magnetic - and try taking great care of them, should they wind up striking away the old wasteland of your loosely learned and rarely rewarded kindnesses. Go easy on yourself for ruthlessly reorienting your productive creative processes, as well, as you’re now committing to the restructuring of what you’ve thought and will soon think of your personal thoughtfulness. With every extra thoughtful sentence your progress will make you more of a force of yourself. And your forces will form the inglorious impetus of your personal momentum swings. And this’ll promote more masks to use; to use and to reflect back to what you’ve prompted to act on you; because what your masks’ll draw out are what altogether can seem like some of the demons of the many unearthed, perhaps countless, haunted and piratically pseudo-menacing boxcutter critics you’re now prepared to parody and take on by parroting the pieces of those committed to their onerously petty outdated professionalisms, awaiting you only on this now mythic day when all y’all perfect the life cycle of the lines y’all’ll realize are all of one circle to next, essentially, ungenerously, exercise their supposedly surgical version of tearing down the slashing light work with disrespect redirected through your growing emotional harmonies. Tune them out, shut them down, destabilize their foundations. If all y’all ask, How best does one do this? I’ll advise: be ever ready to steal your details and edges away from malicious critics of no decent creation. I’m insisting all y’all feel more than content to show lapdogs how the context of their spinelessness forms precisely the conditioned shallow self-expectation of why they don’t understand they forget incompetence is probably self-inflicted punishment. You can always get better; you can always rewrite it again. And if all y’all are cast into the aspersions of incorrectly justified insults, know your best work for these critics is an hellaciously emblazoning force forging, providing the too sure sighting and further proof of their own forgery in portraying for all y’all the depth of their alleged artistic senses. Know once more and forever how envy’s furor is best described as a representation of the ongoing process of someone seeing what someone’s best life could’ve been if someone were a consistently recklessly better version of themselves. Eventually they’ll have to ask if y’all aren’t the picture of the Prince of Darkness on the white page? If whooping monkeys are said to be the sound of the leap of the mind? To this, I’ll reply, “All y’all too often think and say, ‘I know what he wants, not great prose on the page, only everyone’s undivided unlimited attention.’” And thus I’ll crush the naysaying of this notion’s lukewarm assignation in this crude rehashing of my real work, by reminding all y’all I’ve insisted what’s most effortless to note is that what I want is to provide indisputable paragraphical proof of the unforeseen wisdom of an original form. Soon you’ll wonder what would have to happen before all y’all ascertain there’s certainly far more left to discover of and in your un-mastered mysteries, not yet described, than there ever was ironically tabulating what you’ve likely already affirmed, called, labeled, All-Encompassing, by buffing up a calculated completion of more meek trex through bluffing, Your Wisdom, alone.
Offering argument on behalf of originality not yet invented by poem or prose or otherwise must continue showing all y’all now how the soul’s set and setting of any thought stream in any scene in the lucid mind must make as much or more sense sluiced through the subtleties of emotions expressed than if it is or were draped in detail described in the cut contours of some physical room like some formal photo caption.
Now ask then answer: is the miracle of man-made magic only made more real by reconfiguring wasted time’s storied illusions? What do all y’all gain by making it all make sense for everyone all at once? Is this something more for me or you when you say to me it’s what you’ve finally admitted you want to have had happen, like it had to happen? Happened like, it loved to happen, like it had to happen for it is fate.
Lately, I’m easing up on hustling others into their opinions. The literary hot take has to have its options. I used to need to know at once where any and all I corresponded with stood on their favorite sports teams, writers, movies. Yet I’ve now no major admonitions reserved anymore for Mia, King, Gunner, Ozzie if and when they’ve texted me. Only Grace Knox makes me want to go on and periodically pop off with, “If ever you think you’re not sure how y’all got here? Please, play the tape through again. Closely watch it all. Everything. Watch everything. Y’all’ve always played a part. Afterwards? Y’all’ll know why all y’all can’t stop repeating your doltish lurid highlight reels.”
Every time a college football coach yells at a young player not ordinarily older than twenty two or three, yells at a player in practice or on the sideline during a game, a college football coach isn’t yelling at a specific person, the player, he’s yelling at a first-string representative of a specific position, though it looks like yelling at a person, to improve the quality of the position in his lineup with what’s available on his roster of players. The best and better college football coach is only ever invested in the direct modification of a specific position’s improvement, he often does not directly care for whomever the player is playing the position.
You learn the lesson or you don’t. When you don’t learn it? You learn why some lessons are knowing when you’re finished learning a lesson. Your greatest reading experiences’ll scar you with your first ideal derangement. Then, especially, if you write one out for yourself, you’ll want some other person in your life to share this knockabout thing with, and you’ll want this one short story you wrote to sparkle, or for it to maybe shake and shock your literary friends. But the thing is this - the short story most certainly won’t work the one way you want because you need to know from the start that the form doesn’t work like that. And what it is, too, is one way or another, you’ll wonder what’s wrong with you, and not what’s wrong with your writing. Almost always, though, it’s your writing. That’s fine. That’s what you wrote this time round. Mostly you’ll then find you’re unable to not hyper-focus on this first failure’s frenzied frenemy running on a slow-burning fuel, shame, full-fledged. Disreputable and disruptive shame’ll act as it wants, and it’ll get loud on you if you’ll allow it to act up, then it’ll act as an unbound undercurrent until somehow y’all’ll forcibly disallow its incessantly pulling y’all under the wicked wake of your stunning gaffes. And all y’all’ll swim against the black stream, until learning there’s another way to do this, say this, write this down. I finally text Mia back, “The supernatural success of personal delusion is unparalleled and unmatched in human history, worldwide, in fact, in large part, because no matter what you do with it it is real.”
If all ineffable personal development explanations remain elusive, writers’ll know what they need is a dense knockout punch from another writer they trust to revive their, Fight, following a flight to the other side. Some writers are praised only for the success of their work derived from best practices, until their lines gather together the purity of their source and say what they want said so well they even sooth their demons’ evils. “Spot it and you got it.” This is the slightest momentum shift in spelling out what ease you’ve with your eloquent elements, eternally steadfast discipline’s many exclusive inevitabilities’ll remain inexplicable, yet the rewarding, and rewiring sense of, Knowing how well you know what you see when you know you know it when you see it, as a feeling, and as a whole, will often know not one word about the route it took to get there, nor will it exactly all click so well here all at once one can explain its bounty beyond providing breviloquent versions of personal experience.
When you have it to give away or when it is in your hands, IYKYK, one can’t be too respectful nor openly too interested in any writing one doesn’t nor won’t find a way to like or love, because one must consider one’s writing energies entirely ever-readied to entrust toward catching every sizzling feather-lick of personal instinct on the page in the best portions and better parts of one’s next directly personally blessed soul restructured by the lesson-learning sentence. Commonly reconsidering one’s opinion as an exercise is not a curse, but it can distract one from their prized and potent intuitions. Destructive distractions’ll riven a novelist’s required unconditional love for their novel in progress if resentment is found forming on either side of their work. Wherever resentment thrives? It beclouds the reality-blending actions of one’s writing and reading in both of the selves at work. And thus when one befriends another novelist’s newest novel? The novel work may make one maraud their own mind with doubt, or the novel can do as much damage as a masked dagger might dare to do when some other novelist’s newest novel confidently comes across as an unclassified document, revealed as adappled in the unbarring suddenly bareknuckled barbs and bombs of an unfriendly book recommendation’s gutting punchline. So when a work of fiction asks if a reader would politely go fuck right off? This phenomena can be boiled down and or best described as a genre abridging many kinds of fiction - and this is the subliminal attack novel. Beware the subliminal attack novel disguised as a friendship borne of believing in fiction’s belief in better fiction, because when one picks up the novel of another, perhaps confident the novel will do what great novels do while riding on the wings of inscrutable optimism aslope all the wind of another writer’s given advice, advice strengthened usually by some predating course of very positive, consistently strong, referrals for other novels one has adored, loved, reread, recommended to others? Please, take note, that this outside source will never not know their own interests first foremost. A novelist cannot come second before a novelist if finished rewriting one’s far better version of one’s tiny or titanic tome.
A more potent intuition is lost on anyone composing a novel if this novelist isn’t careful with the novel’s majestic sweeping out through the disturbing karmic distribution of one’s daily life’s reimbursements. What one writes changes what one feels in the world where they work. And if and when one is not noticing they don’t notice they are not rejoicing when their novel’s intuitive inflections always hang round the informative ghostly heat of the people a novelist is closest with? Or if one doesn’t ordinarily or is too late in knowing one can unintentionally grow sick of their loved ones? A novelist knows their novel cries out for what it craves to create. And the novelist interprets their daily catch in the cryer’s cathartically crying out for any reestablishing pattern of sunset and moonrise, where almost overnight the novelist’s house of cards of a novel knows how to reorient special protections for its creator against first light’s burning out or the craftsman ever drowning in the overcast of all kinds of conditions potentially decimating-ly described by any kind of local Caroline Chanticleer’d weather vane’s interpretation of warm or wild and foul meteorologics. It is in this literary bent where the life of the novelist’ll need the fiction that they find on their pages to be found abusied, even when they aren’t, embellishing and editing and edifying the once dulled yet now rectifiable emotional emblems of their lives lost to their texts’ lifetimes. The novel you write for and to yourself is in every instance and interaction you’ve with the loving language of your world, a phoenician rebirth. And when I reconsider what I think of these text messages I’m receiving that inevitably lead to the help I give? I’m often more sure, with every emotional revision’s refinement, they’re all part and parcel of a newer literature of our checking out our literary temperatures. They’re textual temperature checks, manuscripted heat checks, and maniacal readings for what hybridian pop-cultural artifacts we’re pioneering in our sessions’ extra energies, pop-cultural artifacts of a version of what really only sportswriters and sports pundits and sports personalities and sports columnists have used to compete with the combative popularity of the stand-up comic’s idyllic iconic punch line. We want to compete in and with and on our own terms. Writers want to dominate barside conversation in our own humor. And we want to be accused of because we can prove we’ve since forever been dropping mind-opening gems onto the apogee of our audience’s crown by running all of our electro emotional heat levels higher and higher via the broad back door of the left ear canal; and make all manner of unimpeded and successful straight shots through and back down the logical spine of a winning argument’s networking until any listener and all listening eyes illume in the glitter of constellated sense-making.
Essential text message lesson learning says we’ve lately figured out how to stoke and stock more of our imagination’s free space in putting together the point totaling of our totems of point making, this works if you work with it by staking out conflagrancies in your wordsmithing’s overstanding soul. We’ve all turned up in clear competition to present the ideal and prescient literary hot take, like only one novel of ours’ll live after our collaboration has ended, only one person will find change.
In our sessions, I’ll mostly say to them, “Go right ahead. Get to it. Yes, please take someone’s head off with fireworks, gunplay, knife tricks. But let’s also double check how everyone’s told us their name’s spelled.” In short, all things said in our sessions broadly emphasize balletically spelling things out. “You should know what someone means when they say something. Know what someone wants what they’re saying to mean. This? All so all y’all’re sure all y’all heard them twice the first time.” No one can tell you how often we butcher the simple names of things said to us, because that’d be mistaken authority spelled out. “When you fumble another person’s point of view to the point where your take on theirs reeks of staunchly deliberate miscomprehension? Your points turn irrelevant.” You’ll make your worst spiteful mistakes by arguing another is mistaken when you know what they’re arguing for is totally correct. If one’s literary life arrives at then passes back through itself only to come to a psychic point where it is lived metaphorically on a page? It’ll most certainly enhance one’s altitudinal attitude to recognize one always stands atop a rhetoric of unlimited gratitudinal groundswelling. Any time clear cut choices must be made to motivate a manufacturing of motivation (it only works this way (it’s always this way)) your novel’ll have you see things anew, and its sentences’ll run more lambent only the longer one’s completely conscious of an open-endedness, a knowing of what the novel never wishes to say about its building body of work: that a more potent intuition wants to play god since it just might be god.
Grace Knox texts me, “When thespians grow curious for letters, and sentences, perfect paragraphs, speed-reading has to be a great actor’s secret weapon. They’re better at it than anyone reading as much as or more than a novelist.” A word to the wiser novelist you may know now very well if you’re this far gone but productively deep in your own work: do not go off on a tangent, nor explain, to any Grace Knox in your life, exactly why her slick Southern suckerpunch rhetoric is unfair, unjust, unreal, unsourced, unfounded. Just don’t take the bait, here, because they want all y’all to waste your time wading through what they already know you know they’ll disagree with because it wastes your time so well. As above, so below, and let the starshot instigate intolerable behavior’s more appropriately dolled out revenge. Grace Knox knows what she’s saying, why it reads all wrong. When anyone approves of an instinctual resonance amidst some unfair resistance borne of a simple test in a trifling text message, this is an ancient signal of an invisible escutcheon of one’s higher self’s divine guidance. And all that said, maybe, I can at least argue any speed-reading method, only its deliberationlessness, has any merit. It is mindless detachment’s contextual relabeling, gussied up by one’s supposed relief from all morally complicated and distracting relevelings demanded by lined-thought’s deeply enthickening grooves. If one is really reading something through? The constant reevaluation of everything you’ve ever thought gets spotted, highlighted, then called out to account for its effusive platform, or hightail it out of your present perspective. It’s the inverse of toxic doubt, truth double checking for what one’s since forever allowed unfettered reign, dovetailing askance the constant construction of rigorous writing’s emotional architecture.
Now were I even one year younger? I’d’ve criticized this Grace Knox idea, and then her personality, to no end. And then to her face? I’d’ve proudly performed my displeasure’s dispassionate disposition.
But, lately, before freely giving these raw energetic resources away, I’ve counter-argued against my acrimonies, kept them closer to my chest. And so now I’d like to yet I won’t respond with, Your alternative reading speeds will help your eyes sharpen, most, especially, when all’s going right in your writing. You’ll slowly see how it’s all progressing your sensibilities into an unworriedness, and it’s a rapacity you’ll surely need when page after page of anything this thoroughgoing feels too plodding. Great speed in reading also hurls you into your authority so you believe in yourself when you tell anyone else you know you could pull aside any person on the street, and tell them something like, It took forever and a day, but hand to god, I found it. I have to ask myself, about every line, Does it work at the strip club? If it does, then it works. I won’t say, Please don’t go bartend, Grace. The fake poets there assume you’re with them because, you, for some reason, cannot read through all their mirror and mirage and depthlessness. And I can’t tell her, Everyone knows murky dregs and frothy beer foam remain a flotsam, not some common constant consumption’s darkest omen. I see why Grace Knox would love to bartend my drunk confidence to obtain my inebriation’s better writing tips. I can’t and won’t drop dimes if she’s bartending from where she’s also never going to fully embrace what fated deathlessness demands: pure naked truth. Where it happens out in the public theater? One eventually learns one cannot work out nor on their feather-ruffling things safely. So, I won’t now, though I want to text Grace Knox, “Artists cannot afford to waste time with affairs or the passwords of the ordinary thought-population’s publicly fake back room, for the actual artist must act in complete concord with their privately pernicious extreme tastes.”
Your extremes are everything and more to the novelty of your art. If the bellwether of one’s beautiful madness is saturated by the begotten rigors of the politesse required by one’s offering of one’s mind before the first of any pulchritude comes full circle in the circa of the sentence, then a novel’s plot may not be required any more than impulse redirecting a more attentive reader’s eyes back through a next sentence’s sequence.
One of the more delightfully whimsical parts of ADHD is entirely forgetting how one knows some specific piece of information until the nugget comes in handy at the exact right time, and in its complete application and comprehensible usage, it then acts like it is something fated, playing the part of magical awareness, like, From the ether, a sign has surfaced. Estimates among football experts vary, and the internet doesn’t agree either, yet I’ve always believed a football player must make roughly more than one million good hard tight-spiraled passes before anyone with any play designing power anywhere trusts a strong set of acrobatic hands well and long enough to take even just one first snap under center playing quarterback in the National Football League. Watching these developments evolve, the sportswriter must ponder on this uncertain to last but unusually bettered touch until the sportswriter is forced to ask the North American Football Gods their belief: are one’s physical, actual hands, or one’s anticipatory mind fractals better off on-field once this overlarge number’s been verified? The correct answer?
Yes. Both. Of course. See, the elite mind’s mindlessness matters much more when it is subsumed by the stress of the threatened body. Beyond acrobatic hands, every promising professional quarterback learns they have to understand more of their ancient animal mind than before when and if they’ll have to know precisely how to use any specific part of this split-second decision-making. Developing the talent of the ancient mind is private before it is public - and if you cannot see it developing, yourself, then you must know you only think it cannot be taught. A thoughtlessness vastly more vital than knowing; because one cannot think when they must move their feet, turn their shoulders, pivot their head, avoid, anticipate, dodge invisible malice blitzing their spine from the blindside and doing everything it can to take one off one’s feet. All this wisdom has to come from next to nowhere for one to survive for longer than one offensive series of passing plays in a professional pocket.
Playing quarterback, when will you learn you don’t have fear to worry about anymore? Exactly when your refinements’ refinements are well-established in renewing their renowned alerts, easefully resurfacing despite one’s homeostatic body regulations constantly catering toward their impermanency to keep one calm. Quarterbacking refinement is knowing when and where you take deep shots, when you take or don’t take big risks, when you see better options by pretending you won’t but then you do hand the ball off to a halfback. Knowing when you check down to short targets, you force the opponent to ask, are you opening up deep threats you’ll take over the top later if right now you gain more than minimal but not extremely high totals of yards by taking slightly fewer yards than you know you could by making sexy, daring decisions? Or do you win for knowing when to get out of the way in order to more efficiently score? You’ll too learn of something else you should always know, how, after a certain age, if you too often seriously, listen to anyone tell you about yourself, like, “This is you, the quarterback, and this is the way you play the game.” They’re going to first begin with saying the worst things imaginable, and they’ll eventually finish you off by saying far worse things once you let them stop performing their social validations before you. You’re better off for saying, “This I what meant, in case this is your first time.” Ozzie texts me, “You have to think a great coach knows why, when his team runs it in for six points, that we find it more beautiful when I can text and then tell you how his team scores, without embellishing, ‘They run the wildcat on fourth and goal for the first scoring series of the opening quarter’s fourth offensive sequence.’ If you know, then you know, by now, why your better and very best attack sentences consistently read like marvelous ASMR video’d neurological floods for any preeminently indoctrinated or non-agnostic practitioner.”
I say, “Are we quarterbacking the ADHD novelist’s black bible?”
Ozzie says, “A neon text’ll make every sentence a brighter tube. We fashion illuminated manuscripts at the intersection of you and I.”
I say, “Please see through these pages for where we come from.”
I don’t doubt the zodiac downloads I drunk text myself when I’m deploying what I want to wake up to when I want to work on something different every next morning. I sent one, “Some might say the stress of good news tries killing us so smiles’ll outlast the hefty repercussions our gaffes’ll take back from our first getting gassed up.” In another instance, through a TikTok, I recently tossed myself a blasphemously overarching devil’s advocate roof beam of fresh college football knowledge, it’s what amounts to a lethal expansion I did not until I did then definitely know I desperately needed to see specifically because said information instantly set my college football imagination scrambling à la Lamar Jackson.
From my iPhone in three minutes that then turned into three hours more amidst my hot constant soft monkey-whoop’d, “whooooo’s!” I learned how, during their twenty sixteen regular season, Princeton University’s Tigers football team outsmarted their opponents using a savvy and speedy and exhilaratingly unorthodox experimental freak play designer talent. It wasn’t predicated on some star player’s special skill set though, it was more like head coach, Bob Surace, running onto the field every play so he could subvert every college football norm as he puppet-mastered player motions until all opposition succumbed to a competitive psychosis as Surace’s offense gaslit defenses nationwide. He used shoots and shovels and zags and runs and bursts. A revolutionarily sophisticated college football offense, Bob Surace’s squad ran everyone ragged by perfecting an unbelievably unpredictably bewildering and efficiently bedeviling rare three body system: an extra-extra-extra spread offensive scheme with three quarterbacks featured on the field at once.
Ozzie texts me, “ADHD novelists hunt better personal attentions. They’ll often also not like openly admitting how if you’re no charming social threat, nor unpredictably personable, or if you’re unreasonably too prone to reject the beguiling, strange, mystic, then there’s a neurotic spur towards the non-interactive, and a great chance they’d like it best if they didn’t have to deal with what you work with: the damnably bland.”
If you don’t you should know the quarterback position in modern American football is supposed to represent the head coach’s strategic mind demonstrated on the field. Ninety nine point one percent of the time, at any level of the game, there is one quarterback on the field. By bringing on three, two extra, quarterbacks, to set and place and play bestride and sometimes far outside the hash marks, Princeton flouted the single passing player precedent on most all their downs. No one on the other side of the line of scrimmage had any idea who would have the ball or where the pass was coming from or if the QB’d run it forward - and I’d similarly also not one idea until now this was a season-length thing. But they did it. Did it every down, every game. Got good at it too.
I respond, “The ADHD novelist is a spiritually sane man but he’s also currently trapped in an American literature climate preparing for a nuclear crisis in a Manhattan of skyscraping personal, emotional, psychic mistakes. Wherever you stand? Know you’re getting hit hard.”
There’s a baroque historical pressure applied to every Ivy League football coach that often today’ll begin with combatting the rest of the prestigious university’s common opinion of one’s program’s good work, and how does a coach fight back against the brilliant thousands that say, “You cannot be serious.” Well, in the end, everyone has had to ask, who else but Bob Surace’s impresario coaching staff, tasked with crafting and staging success on an unimpressable Ivy League field, would do so bold an impressive thing as saying through an unimaginably high style that they will at any cost make their maneuverings prove, to no less than an highly esteemed school in an Ivy League college football conference infamous for never once offering full-ride scholarships to football players whom typically work hours as long or longer than current university employees, that their coaching staff’s leadership’s absolute best ideas affirm their bunch isn’t some boyishly muscled-up-madman-amalgam maestro-ing a machine’d success of bruising, dumb, thuggery. But, rather, they’re the gathered Princeton-pedigree footballing geniuses now manifesting the materials for the next level of the extra-extra-extra spread offense? Princeton’s Tigers forced every set of opponent head football coaches to almost always question almost all of their reality. Surace’s twenty sixteen Tigers were an otherworldly success flourishing exclusively through one man’s delightfully flexible and versatile and nearly constant barrage of better misdirection. Every week Bob Surace’s staff taught a schematics class, an execution clinic, a demonstrable seminar of revamped excellence. Surace’s genius designs rewrote the rules, he wrote a game-changing mega-novel of a season unrelated to football’s reality. It was very real. It won an Ivy League championship.
Mia texts me again, “You’re saying, ‘Be grateful you’re delusional.’  Or, ‘The reality of delusion is the major mindful truth of your fiction.’ When people ask you what you do all day, and when you say you’re lying for a living? This indicates an inferencing toward all the times when one can misunderstand the actual truth of language. Like, if truth is misunderstood just enough, then it’s an immaculate fiction. When famous words, terms, ideas, truth, reality are used incorrectly, correctly? Recombined in this way they can inject your consciousness with fresh insights you’ll verify you can vouch for. You can vouch for what, ‘A.I.’ commonly means for sportswriters, right? Answering just wrong enough corrects and or marks today’s popularized use of, ‘A.I.’ the way we want. Beyond us who would ever wonder who would think I was first referring to Allen Iverson instead of artificial intelligence? The sportswriter. Both A.I.’s’d play well to our imaginations, and both A.I.’s play at the mind’s meeting an accelerated intellect of an alien intelligence, and Allen Iverson’s true basketballing intelligence was physically alien-like, because in all game situations, A.I. strafed every bright scene with the reality of artificiality, his handles, the dribbling, and the crossovers, you could not watch him play hard, go off on his opponents, and not grow cold to old questions, because you know you’re thinking, ‘This can’t be real.’ That’s the, REAL. And if one is ever caught actively resenting how refreshingly resetting the unreal is on the mind’s perception of the real? It does nothing more than prove beyond all doubt how resentments are emotional bear traps. Emotional bear traps unusually adept in misusing their illusions of the common thought, where it is the too convincing obstacle that’ll insist the barrage and bulk of your problems are far greater than sentimental animosity. Resentment’ll never not want your undivided attention. The menace within one’s resentments can’t handle knowing of your real resiliencies. Everything arguing it is enormously dangerous to be this A.I. good at something this hard to do, it’s like most people will totally forget most people would prefer not to be bothered with formal requests for what you already know you can have and hold.”
The professional sportswriter nowadays is no longer some playful soul selling off their activation-ready descriptions of sports terminology. Whenever someone somewhere wants a sport-specific seer’s unbiased and thoughtfully action-based assessment of the sporting activity in any American sporting competition, the modern sportswriter also has to prepare for the other part of the job, coming completely over-prepared and preloaded and packed and loaded and dukes up with steel fangs and multiple sets of jawbreaking brass knuckles. The professional sportswriter must act as an unabated abattoir and a dynamo. They publish and then they gear up to unload argumentative buzzsaws and blades and barbs so they may creatively beat back and ward off a personally customized universal condemnation machine. Sportswriters everywhere know their readers love arguing, so they must preemptively pulverize doofy critical remarks by emphatically crushing the socially unchallenged and too common anonymous malevolent actors behind the too commonly remarked upon air-headed rumination. The worst criticism sportswriters’ll suffer is that they never played a specific sport, so they can’t know what they’re talking about. And yet the real and true sportswriter sets the terms and conditions of the piece and the follow up sports hot take, and all of the ongoing hostile terms of engagement.
And one typical thoughtlessness I’ve heard truly too often disproportionally twisted into a fake hot take, heard from many fans I usually love to hear from, and this is a thing that’s also never once some well-intentioned sporting refrain, rather a nasty kind of comment designed to suggest how easy coaching college football is, because the sports information-butchering mouth blathering below their blinkered and blindly confident bloodshot eyes believes it is connected to by far the best view of the action on the field because their apparatus is presently beached on a big couch, absorbed in the solar and sonic blast of their home’s high-definition television broadcast, these puffy, red, nearly Rolling Stones logo of lips unloosed’ll always want undue unpaid credit for a certain level of a particular kind of crass coaching criticism. And, while entertaining, these lowbrow lambasts almost always also come from a place of profound misconception of strategy, an overall ignorance scuppering all possibility of holding onto good faith when this unnuanced nuisance of an hostile know-it-all-ism announces how it is ever ready to pass on to its surroundings a judgment only produced to pronounce and to prevail upon other nearby fans what fans will always forget about college football coaching strategy. And this is why college football coaches fear but must also know they will know their paths better when they never once ever allow into their minds this spittle, because they know their jobs are not even close to exactly like coaching jobs in the professional sporting world, where winning - without every year enacting the perfect pixelation of pulling one star player from here and one promising star player from there in a nationwide recruiting pipeline building process perpetually in progress - is all that really matters. No. What most fans try and get all y’all to think, if all y’all don’t know any better and listen to the rant, is that it is always so godawfully easy to get exactly how to best compete to win big games completely wrong, because most couch-coaching foul-minded fans think most college football coaches will overthink their game plans, that coaches will always want to run complicated offensive systems that do nothing beyond show off the verbose range of their play-calling imaginations.
The composite or universal college football coach would love for most if not all of these brandname braindead megaphones to do them a small solid favor. Don’t ever breath a word out loud of nor reread like it’s literature what all y’all hear or read on your college football Twitter feed. All college football Twitter feeds feature noxious cesspools where every contributor acts from a place of immortally blotto or blackout drunk confidence when they clumsily articulate their preferred contours of the best offensive path forward for their team. College football Twitter is a toxic, dreary place where every over-tense armchair quarterback has to at least once a game howl, “Run the damn ball!”
“Run the damn ball!" is my least favorite thing to overhear from any soul oversharing their horrible hot takes on college football. Why? When armchair quarterbacks scream, “Run the damn ball!” they’ll forever neglect saying specifically which lineman’s gap on which down the back with the ball should shoot through at what rate of delay and or instantaneousness because of which defensive read they’ve made at the line. Sportswriters assume this must ultimately mean to a vague yet brutal extent why every wary college football coach knows far too well that all of those in their privileged position’ve to begrudgingly embrace the sports media hype-fueled byproduct of what every current college football program in the nation now un-reluctantly uses in an effort to maintain a constant buzz surrounding the name of their school when they aren’t winning as many big games as they’d like, another college football Twitter fodder production, a big behemoth contraption built like an orbiting whipsawing tool that induces big names to introduce hypothetically bigger names, a rotary mechanism punctuated by an inimitable iconography that’s used to secure some form of consistent sport-wide notoriety and competitive relevance and ethical credibility and nostalgia-inducing longevity, a thoughtless machinery, a constantly reconfiguring blurt, the singular populist threat to all college football coaching job security, a thing of only hot seats, a thing on everybody’s minds at all times of the year, the unending, Coaching Carousel.
Once the Coaching Carousel tintinnabulates? It never stops talking nor asking, “Having fun? Had enough? Is this what all y’all want? What does fun look like? What’d make this team more fun to hype up when they’re not playing?” And then taunting, “Good enough for all y’all?” Or, “Can y’all maybe do better?” And, “Where is this current successful college football coach from our sideline going to coach college football next, once he’s gotten too good for it?” Both good and bad, the college football Coaching Carousel’ll playfully adopt every jersey logo and helmet decal and colored facemask conceivable to play out and game out just one particular part all college football fans love to also embody: the jabberwocky prognosticator.
The Coaching Carousel adores most its untentative tentacular tabbing of the many coaching names it brings out and about and around. It’s like a young novelist telling their creative writing teacher all of the legion of writers they’ve logged and lodged into their sensibilities that they’re grateful they’ve read. It can explain what everything is and why everyone is doing what they’re doing because it thinks it knows the motivations and incentives coveted by everyone everywhere.
Every single college football coach fears this inimical Coaching Carousel like every creative writing teacher fears their already prolifically talented student, so adept at watching the world develop they’re unknowingly interpreted by and incorporated into their teacher’s thought stream as a peer in prime position for mercurial growth spurts.
College football coaches know mostly winning, well, really only winning will justify the outrageous money they’ll warrant and work hard for at each threshold where they are supposed to claim pay raises for their talent, and for their team of college football coaching talent, when they sign deals, or, again, they’ll take their turn Coaching Carouseling.
Lately I’ve noticed every large-scale financial worry in and on matters of money, wherein college football coaches demand of their Institution that they worry for appropriately astronomical or worry for a lack of income if there are no victories, usually the request for raises goes on for so long the copious cries for cash eventually seem like they potentially prevent a personal production of long-felt dollared windfall.
It seems that what’s most hard at work in this practice is peripheral paranoia, only ever more encouraging no self-empowered self-produced cycle of manmade moneymaking, but, instead, the maliciousness of at first being committed to one place, then the taking of action of seeing other people, so when one is seen out seeing and meeting with other universities to gain and game for the gross greenery they want, this duplicity is what really shows a lot of what ails the deserving mind based on the assumption of a lack of a resource, intensified interest in an ideal iteration of college football coaching ideology, over actually knowing there always exists an abundance. And out here? This deep in the ether of the ever expanding college football universe? There’s no limit to the end of limits as we’ve once understood, so, too, the unending college football Coaching Carousel gets deployed, gets debated, ad infinitum.
King texts me, “If life in Greece is purely about the burning wind? Then empurpled Southeastern lives are nothing but flammable liquid.”
College football coaches are fired more than any other kind of coach in any other sport. And its inverse? Common occurrence too - college football coaches are rehired more often after being fired than any other coach in any other sport. College football is an extraordinarily democracy-complected institution; important in traditional American folkloric stories it tells itself in order to remain upbeat; because college football team power structures wield grandiose local influence, and thus get held accountable to their grass roots’ opinions more often than those entrenched within similarly modern democratic mechanisms of locally commercialized municipal politics. The last time you heard thousands of a colorful citizenry went out of their way to tailgate a City Council debate, was when? That’s right. You didn’t. You never did. You never would. You might’ve gone out of your way for a college football game, because you’ve heard of the legendary theater the entire ritual evokes.
The most compellingly American democratic sporting spectacle’s prime time-worthy social and preparatory presentations are also all on their lonesome more than spectacle enough, every week, for every level of its extending local communal chatter to know in every town where college football is popular one’ll feel the extensive stress or joy of always needing to have some take, vantage, stance, where one can effortlessly show that they know what’s right and wrong about what sports media pundits say about their local football team. “Knowing the score means all y’all are really living here, because all y’all know what time it is.”
And then too that what matters more to one’s community is that once one joins their local college football tribe, when they feel they should know what is right and wrong within the elevated realm of the powerful college football decision making processes, this understanding of what justice looks like when locals face outcomes and decisions made by people who’ve never visited where you walk and work and live, then, that’s when one melds with a months-long community’s energetic motion, motion that makes what means more to the community matter more. And it is in this making what matters more matter even more to a community where what’s required is the unusual onus of fructifying proof placed upon the quality of the community’s attention paid, what’s spawned within the exchange between every far flung hovel’s armchair quarterbacks and their local hot take linemen, debates on the expertise of the expert Saturday play callers, all college football’s yawping proves time, and time again, college football relies on itself, and its successful community building relies on one gigantic thing only people inside of college football know about college football: college football is one of the rare American echo chambers that’ll actually listen to its reasoning.
Grace Knox texts me, “You want for us all to believe your three relationships with Ozzie, Gunner and King are the author’s individual relationship with the brothers within, ‘The Brothers Karamazov.’ You think the Russian novel has been reincarnated in Neosouthern fiction.”

Due to the collectivized voice of democratized popularity’s more than respectable demand, we’ve learned in early twenty twenty four that the College Football Playoff Selection Committee is set to nix its standing television agreements and stadium-use contracts within the next half-decade. All this so it can finally cater to a behemoth desire for a College Football Playoff expansion. Twelve teams means twelve steps in the right direction. We’ve gone from a four-team’d orblet featuring the best of the beyond the best, where only the greatest college football teams of all time have a chance to play for a National Championship, toward a true and honest and fair and finally equitable twelve-team’d playoff pool where any good team can win it all. It’s a big deal, there is a constantly increasing nationwide investment in college football. A fiscally diversified maelstrom of monies cannot come raining down from students, donors, boosters, fans, collegiate administrations fast enough, these dollars are new notions of emboldened local opinion, they matter more since every college football town is a nation to itself.
I respond, “In all cults of charismatic personality when it’s coming live from the dankest Babylon basement, you’ve got to let the magic of first impressions burn as freakishly slow as cinematically possible. These nights, I imagine the Grace Knox iPhone as not only thunder stolen from what can become of a lovely original voice, soul, mind, but a rotating significant insight I cannot completely source, because I’ll’ve to ask if you know where your light comes from? Is it you? Or the phone?”
Every school’s football program needs somebody at the helm with at least some of the confidence that only comes from winning college football games. All head coaches will, through their public appearances, television spotlights, sideline interviews, day-to-day interactions with players, have to drown out non-believers and naysayers. College football coaches have to constantly sell their program to their staff and team and communities and win over everyone their own way through their off-the-field personality’s best representation of what they believe then can show contributes toward the hundreds, thousands, of major and micro preparations that perfect the total football team product that produces a winning on-field performance. They have to perform the archetypes of their expectations since every coach needs to know that everyone around them wants to be an extension of their style of mind too.
Strong college football program performance is complicated but also made more valuable while coaching in the treacherous Southern theater’s trenches and swamps and deserts, because a Southern football style’s mastery’s more idiosyncratically sophisticated than merely selling one’s specific logical and emotional sporting expression of complete competitive instinct. The coach has to play the parts of father, preacher, politician, guard dog, and lion all at once. Southern football families, programs, boosters are proudly self-seeking and local king makers. They think it’s their responsibility to see to it that they know you know they know if you’re faking it, they’ll know what’s true by absent faith in self, since Southern college football excellence is simply something you cannot master unless you believe in your extension of yourself: your spiritual program. More over, if in what you’re doing, you learn you know you don’t know what you’re doing right, but people round you say you’re doing it right, then what you’re doing is doing the best work you can imagine, despite not knowing what you’re doing right, when you’re doing it right, which is amazing and miraculous and this means you’re your program’s top performer, and you can tell people you know what you’re doing if for no other reason than you can know your paycheck says you above all others know how to perform when it matters most.
Even if you’re living in the raw thrust of a beginner’s enthusiasm, feel awash in the awesome savant momentum of devilsome locomotion - IYKYK - you’ll still know the mysterious beauty of not knowing your name’s legacy from any present position in your lettered practice. And, so, of course, if I say, “Call yourself Merlin until you know you’re not Llewellyn Armarillo,” then this must mean you’re supposed to outsmart your blind spots as you throughout all your days gone by in your writing, completely turn your outstandingly outsized confidence into formidable and foundational killer talent, the one thing your confidence called into your mind’s opinion of itself before you had what you know you needed, this one big thing you know no one else was born with, underscoring your aspirations of finally orchestrating a skillfully original literature.
From every day onward you should say to yourself, This is a place where my knowing how to make people I love sense unconditional love will become vastly more important than asking for any of them to love me. One should take great advantage of when one can take careful note that nothing of this kind of unconditional love is ever undone unless you’re asking someone else to do what they can do for you because they can do it for you. Even then it’ll return, so says Slugg, my name for my mind’s action when I’m the coach on the field, the quarterback, who says and will often be quoted as and spotted gladly telling everyone in his program it’s an easy sell to show all this unconditional love to one’s discipline, one’s personal college football program, one’s program of emotional and spiritual recovery, if and when you can sell that you do know what you’re doing when nearly no one knows what you’ll do next.
Slugg’ll slip into and slide through an accentuated Southern parlance if he wants to appear sly in the sports media. Southern college football coaches from this field of dreamscaping have earned a special kind of stereotypical confidence from their every onlooker, seemingly without trying, because when they perform? Southern college football coaches sound the most or far more credible, since everyone privy to college football folklore knows the South just plays a better brand of college football. The Southeastern Conference has at least one team every season that’ll’ve serious sporting people arguing could reasonably take down the worst NFL team the same season, if given the chance.
And it’s never not fun for sportswriters to speculate on this kind of bullshit. It sounds like reality. Speaking of sounding real, I’m convinced Slugg’s invented his Southern vibration. Essentially Slugg’s vibration’s invariably a lot like mine, I’ve freely admitted my red hands quaking’ve shown I’ve stolen a Southern novel from myself. What might you do with this sun-shining subjectively Southern saturated information?
Well, since the finest interpersonal information flows freely, once you’ve accepted you know all this and these things and your truths, you should know if you were Slugg, you would know you can’t trip. There are no hard choices. There is a performance taking place. You can’t stop because you can’t be stopped. You are the right running rigor of your own rapid black riverwater. Keep on rolling. Slugg’d tell all y’all every single head college football coach eventually admits to anyone they trust that they want to show everyone they care infinitely for their steady impassioned personal and programatic progress, show how all their work within their program proves that they want for nothing more than the spiritual wealth of their cumulative performative charisma to act as an epicentral river level running right, because any epicentral river’s level shows everything of the enriching liveliness of the water levels running among every nearby stream and creek and brook and puddle and rivulet. Your thoughts adjust the velocity of the right running rigor of your program’s rapid black riverwater. Slugg’d say that this is how all y’all get on his level. The beauty of a winning football program comes from trusting your most unusual behaviors. And all y’all’ll get on my level once and for all when your source material, no matter whatever the colored humor of your bile, can benefit you in your one way of uniquely reconfiguring, for leverage, all the chatter of what you know and must imagine are everybody’s expectations of your chances to win, because everybody knows any program’s quality must go from unknown to competent to great before we’ve got some good chance to win but one game. Within unified belief in the quality of the quirks in one’s talent, only here can a coach transform a promising program of recruits on paper, into the real pounding thing. It’s an All-American alchemy.
And, then, a good sportswriter’s critic should ask, “For advancing all my All-American alchemy, what tools should I want on my hands?” And, then, Slugg’d say, “Though sort of easy to present your program’s promisingly successful preeminent stature to young gifted players once y’all’ve done it, like when and if one’s got the big Bowl Game wins to back it up? Remember it’s vastly harder for coaches to seek out the exact like-minded individual position-specific archetypes with the miraculous physical gifts that’ll transubstantiate all observably recruitable playing talent into a broad signature construction within a consistently winning juggernaut of a proud program in a Power Five Conference. But further on in my dream scenario, in consistent triumph, all’s done exuberantly well and I’ve sent multiple recruits to the NFL, grown famous in one indisputable half-decade from deep inside the decadent Southeastern Conference. You should have a perfect set of answers on hand at all times. You do that? The NFL comes around asking about your five year plan. I’d do a Nick Saban, but a better version, for me, because Saban is the greatest college football coach of all time to flop professionally, then come back to the college football, and the SEC, freakishly better than before. So, if it’s me? I’m like all college football coaches, I want to build my program no shade nor shape different than Nick Saban’s glorious, empyreal, dynastic, powerhouse, Alabama Crimson Tide. Most good college football coaches are realistically grateful to just settle for the still-never-not-astonishing-dominance possible some place where a coaching job seems or is safe for longer than twenty four months, in a college football conference outside the SEC, because no matter what happens, every program can dramatically change in one calendar year, and the Coaching Carousel runs in theory just like an high functioning version of American democracy, despite the egotistical threshold of a certain amount of effort, the big humming rotation of faces’ll tell all y’all it’s got space for all y’all if all y’all want to work hard. Slugg always seems temperamentally adjusted toward seeking long term success in the SEC, even if his thing is he’s acting out his own Southern Gothic Fiction, bluffing the world, pretending he has a strong belief in destiny, he makes even the most unrealistic of absurd details seem beyond real.
In a text message come alive as it is read aloud in my muscle car rental, I hear Gunner telling me, “The cross-hatching chiseled etchings of the letters on the perfect page are like our eyes sliding along the hem of His garment. And so to speak of this refracts the shadowing outpour of what lines will light what’s shown within the way one walks. Kinetic hymns are asking, Are you asking the impossible of yourself in asking yourself if you’re sure you’re protected on both sides of your personal spiritual scales? Could you confidently leave it up to chance? And then! only then-” only to watch a barrage of multi-bannered waterfalling text messages, all from Gunner, saying, “I can’t remember if it was you or someone else saying to me that it was you that said this or maybe it was someone told me I should have heard of this if I was with you when you said this one thing you picked up from somewhere else entirely, picking up what you’d said about what you’d not wanted remarked upon on or said about it a while ago, who had initially told me about our keyboard demons. Or keyboard daemons. And the respect they had for what goaded them or made them double check every single key-struck detail countless times over and over again. Devotion-triggering and inspiriting-detail-orientations. Keyboard demons, keyboard daemons, we see, that can order us around, dominate our systematically superstitious agonies. These singing sprites you’ve suggesting you take a look through all your work more than overconfident in your suspicions you can improve what you’ve done. By committing to endlessly ensickening battles to portray the perfectly voice-pitched document, purest prose is produced by the constant panic of bulleting nervous tics that’d come from mistaking what’d been most important in a moment’s making, comically counter-productive pridefulness, think of J.D. Salinger’s or Franz Kafka’s mind.”
Gunner going on, “Keyboard demons are like the Football Gods, think of the opening quotes Salinger had printed in Franny and Zooey, before a scene of nervous preparation awaiting a guest a man was taking to a college football game. Look through their tropes, their painstaking physical thoughts, Salinger and Kafka are linked by similar demons. So they learned to trust their keyboard demons’ intensifying proclivities? What particular dimensions of rigor were required for knowing any or some sort of post production’s respite? It was like Salinger and Kafka thought they should or they sought to not make any kind of lasting peace because their comically counter-productive pride instead made them want to make up sweeter familial deals for their keyboard demons. Embracing their daemons with unconditional love. Their keyboard demons had a swing at raising kismeticall kinships in their kinderlings.”
And Gunner going on, “Some keyboard demons are motivated by what the Football Gods crave from anyone because they all just want you to play ball. And if I’m right now studying the basic, rudimentary American football I-formation of laid out grid work of labeled slots and gaps, with all the various parts in a line of scrimmage assigned specific letters so I can see the entire offense and defense lined up against each other, let’s consider a MacBook’s or laptop’s mouse pad a QB’s backfield behind where he’ll take the snap from under center, when I see the blueprinted exoskeletal art of the modern keyboard in this I-formation, I’m also envisioning the kind of rewriting all of our keyboard demons require. I know I’ll wind up right when I’ve a very long way of saying, what hard work you do on your own will always show up on the field.”
Dealing with difficult people is the not the same nor really any different than dealing with fiction’s difficult prose stylists. Knowing the discomfort one notices or has to take note of while wholly doubling down on the patience both things’ll present to the person dealing with everything either one demands, it makes one’s commitment to listening, an assumption of what clarity and absurdity must mean in one’s life, completely change. Completely change until the notion nags at one’s probably highly prized and consistently proficiently developing all the requisite empathy that being present with either one of these things requires, until then it’s all over time more a skill in reconsidering what must be said when someone has to say something the way they need to see it said to their listener, you, transforming the way in which one hears what’s happening when something said is said as it is becoming something totally different, because, now please ask yourself, What is more difficult to understand, empathy, or excessive verbal energy? And here, I’ve got Gunner, again, going on, “Salinger and Kafka both finally bothered to learn when and if they could know they knew why they respected their sources of this hustling well enough so they could learn their keyboard demons’ middle names, then they could together build all kinds of far-flung families and relations and maybe make everyone involved feel more whole. A tall task telling these types of tales, since we see what their demons did when they wouldn’t rest nor let their authors have down time. Any possible misstep by each author was never really ever once ignored, nor was the chance that some subtly sinister sleight’d get or been made to sabotage their pride, when they would damnably materialize through sleights of a lettered hand to make a good play for the author’s undivided attention. Both Salinger and Kafka knew their keyboard demons wanted to make themselves right at home, quotidian, workaday, common. The unacknowledged, unseen, uncared-for keyboard demons always’ll seek to destroy all decency within our documents if disrespect is triggered in the errant letter strike. It’s in the glaring typographical mistake, the misuse of your black ink. So you and I need to know where they stand on our everything. If they hate our enthusiasms? They make us work harder. Twice. Divert your attention. Thrice. Mostly you’ll slip not knowing when and where you’ve slipped.”
I don’t say, “What am I supposed to say if someone argues very well for a sly vim-ful presentation of superannuated superstition I don’t know if I embrace because it’s tacit admission I adore their neurosis?” What I say, “We haven’t even begun to discuss the nascent Transfer Portal. Why in two full season its features have flourished. Why Transfer Portal opportunities opening everywhere have delightfully and utterly upended the entire sport of college football. Mostly because the portal has made it more openly professional. Every talented quarterback that’s been a non-starting or redshirt backup somewhere stacked with passing talent sees new life entering years three and four and five if they behave more like professional quarterbacks in years one and two. Players have received far more rewarding professional training by being themselves, by openly pursuing their own best interests. No more falling in line fifth on the depth chart waiting for your current college football program’s baby boomer or Gen-X head coach to have some not guaranteed heart change. You have to know your value and you can play your role today.”
King texts me, “Some of these novels I love are just outrageously unjustified taunts, jests, ragers. It’s like the fiction I love is just whenever one proves what’s more real than what’s real is what’s beyond what-all the worst of the worst people in one’s life have declared false in one’s empassioned pursuits. You’re winning if you’re arguing the best fiction knows one must make real all the other’s lies on one’s soul, like, ‘Do you see what I mean when I show you I can show you what I’m saying?’”
I respond, “Are you in every hour, authentically asking your pages, if the ideal prose is something you show readers? Do you hold unwary’d authority, without winning resentment, declaring, ‘I can make anything I’m interested in investigating emotionally, a dynamically compelling, riveting, electrical expression of its essential epitomization?’ That this is no tart cookie cutter sum of all worst best-selling camel conclusions?”
Your chestful of unspoken energies become voices on your page. Do they have any harnessable inflections? Are they imploring you for the flooring provocation of endless unreal assays best characterized by one’s desire to assign stories to stories within stories? Ask them what they want from you. Ask if you want them to say something specific? Are you constantly pushing down field, pushing people away, pushing all of us into and onto something deeper? Do you think the correct direction is not a thing I think is real? At a certain imprecise point in your progressions you don’t have a chance to have a choice anymore. Would you believe me if I said I first knew of my unspoken energies once they told me that they’d already said, “Now let me tell you something.”
“Now let me tell you something,” means, let me show you how it works. If we come back to the high-risk-high-reward and iconoclastic and unashamed and job-risking constant triple Princeton Tiger quarterback scheme of offensive motion? Not only was the whole thing much too good to be true forever, it was a foreshadowing of what’s become of the nascent Transfer Portal rules for players and for programs desperate for some real help on offense. Players and programs may take advantage of a chance to change what college football program they play for with no repercussions, vis-à-vis, this time next year, everything can look different. In years past, college football players had to sit out one full year following the personal decision to make a program transfer. No more. The most pure sportswriter within me wishes to see something like Bob Surace’s revolutionary twenty sixteen regular season somehow revitalized through a capitalization on assets made available through the Transfer Portal. Think Super Teams, Free Agency, Players Paid For Their Talents. Think of the overall college football universe’s democracy demanding that even Ivy League players receive appropriate compensation beyond their already long overdue tuition scholarships. The sport’s democracy’s arguing powerful adults must stop stealing from gifted kids because they’re eager to improve their great sporting talent. College football’s current classes believe the horrid exploitation from the era of the unpaid internship is caput. Transfer Portal players have overturned countless college football social flaws. Yet like Bob Surace’s Triple Quarterback system? Nothing this groundbreaking is allowed the unbesmirched turf of not soon suffering from some eureka of some opponent defensive coaching soul’s extra-productive bad attitude.
Some great defensive college football minds only succeed if they’re told their team desperately needs them to see through the dash and dazzle of an unholy fantasia, like three quarterbacks on the field at once to activate a supposed sacrilege-crushing cynicism that devises a better bear trap; i.e. the breaking down of any system so a defense forces a team that uses Surace’s triple quarterbacking system to change their offense to win with a traditional single quarterback style by giving them only the one option to score in only one particular way, if they think they can. If they’ve been too good at one style of offense? Sell out. Give them points through another venue. See if they won’t flex another type. Our polysyllabic, purple prose prone, orchestrally operating authors, are very often asked for the solo, singular, Anglo-Saxon, swoons of Carver or Salter, not because anyone thinks it’d help, just, to see if they can do it.
Your higher celestial self needs you to set out to solve the constant subconscious discrepancy between your heart and mind while your soul of souls knows they both remain unintegrated. Great talent’s evolution requires a rudimentary, unconscious and ridiculously true belief in the successful moonshot, think of what’s maybe considered the first bound novel ever composed as a novel is now structurally readied today. From eleventh century Japan, if one reads of Genji amidst the correct slant, the universality of Lucifer’s story in modern humanity is fashioned here, thus we can argue every novel ever after has always been about Lucifer.
Though Surace’s triplicating quarterbacking system lasted only one and one half full years before opponent teams wised up, no more pretending they didn’t just have to sell out and force single quarterback complicity to prevent the beast from unabashedly grabbing great chunks of grass, playing ahead of the chains on every sequence, running over every enemy territory into every end zone, almost, whenever it wanted, it’ll essentially remain forever remembered in an underground college football mythological institutional memory as an unabated orange and blue Surace-Cerberus-y spirit animalization, a bastard of stripes earned.
Surace’s triple quarterback Tiger backfield remains retrospectively victorious. In twenty twenty four its theoretical principles are credence in qualifying experimental and exotic offensive play design. It extended practical proof unto the experimental found beyond humdrum exercise. And as a calling card kind of thing, every college football coach knows about, and as a now too credible threat to not consider could work whenever some offensive coordinator shows they’re willing to posit extra players beside the coach’s mind on the field, it’s like the long-term lesson is one must respect ingeniously barbaric uses of an unpredictable ball carrier, that can also throw downfield as well or better than he can gallop, because for an insane duration of time, Surace gave damn near every teamful of Ivy League level coaching freshly igneous windpipes, it seems, almost, just because he wanted to prove to himself that he could. Opponents could only protest then accept their hellish passage into first admitting strategic self-defeat and then second conceding that they could not not play against Princeton without using the shining path of the way and the words in which Surace redefined the surface and the interior and the implications of the terms and conditions in college football’s ironically constantly changing rules for competitive combat.
Hype aside, not before too long, Surace’s grotesque thing finally yielded to the advantages provided by a single quarterback, yet in twenty seventeen its ultimately hasty demise couldn’t be considered failure, it foreshadowed how, as has happened many times before, the sport’s old guard would fail to prevent the phoenician rise of one truth, one thing in particular: while older strategic idylls survive, they often only do so when and because their proponents and practitioners relentlessly enforce their popularity. The most creatively successful current NFL quarterbacks are Lamar Jackson and Patrick Mahomes. Study their backfield motion when plays break down or the pocket collapses, one at once sees Jackson and Mahomes are more than gifted enough on the move to play all three positions of the Surace triplicating quarterbacking system as one individual, without losing receivers downfield, throwing to all parts of the field from all parts of the field. They spread menace and threat and take their down-field throwing impact potential with them wherever they go. On the move, on defense, to know how to counter how Jackson or Mahomes might attack you with their hands and minds and legs you have to remember to watch their feet. Both players terrorize defenses from wherever the brisk play design takes them to where they then can break down any play by impulse or by design. Once one new potent idea prevails, like quarterbacks roaming the far backfield reaches and wings beyond the borderlands of their first protective lineman pocket in looking for better options to advance the ball by threatening to run to find a much easier way to move the ball upfield in the air because it would have been easier to instead use the ground, coaches will never not continue trying out these wild things. The quarterback’s option itself is the better devil’s advocate’s, “What if?”
Jackson and Mahomes practice repetition of their still applicable proof that they know well, how provocation, subversion, and impulsivity are clear solutions to the chain-link-association-ship of questions their coaches must put to players, without saying aloud, “How do I help you help me?” Bob Surace, every offensive football coach, has had to ask his quarterback nearly every week of every season, How do I help you score more often than before everyone learned everything about how I’ve wanted to attempt to score to win more football games, so I hold onto my job for longer? Mahomes’ll gunsling passes from every arm slot on the clock face of his impossibly imagined release points to elude defending eyes and hands and bodies. Jackson’ll just outrun every one of the eleven against him until defenses flood the line-backing box and he can throw feathered dimes over the middle and up through every open seam of single coverage. Surace used a shapeshifting QB Carousel to defeat speculation he was possibly due for the Coaching Carousel.
Grace Knox texts me, “Music in prose makes the most realistically imagined idea magical. Yet any idea’s incessant reality must not mistake another mind’s imagination for your own, since your personality is in every kinetic instant of mind-play. Corrosive influential instruction from any source grows sour if not actively seen as truth in a subjective form.”
The infusion of enthusiasm is your alchemical source for noticing new details you wouldn’t otherwise think to note, like the, “pop,” when I notice the thin and dark little flash and splat and swirl of the reflected ceiling fan chop and spread on the flank of the aluminum can I lift up so I’ve carbonation sparkling throughout my ear canal as I with only one thumb respond, “This morning I finished rereading, The Little Prince.”
I’ve found, more or less, it’s much more fun forming a functioning utility out of an arguing-and-fighting-with-yourself type of ongoing fictional combat. This is where one is at constant war with the authors they’ve idolized for decades, fighting inside their minds, diagnosing their styles, vivisecting opponents until one’s most present competitive enemy has to be their own older, though actually younger, literary voice still arguing for one’s less evolved previous pages of prose, all so one can become a better version of their aspirational authorial apogee. When innately powerful memories inordinately shackle us to what we used to think? It’s working within your interpersonal warlord for rewards that grows one’s taste for not nominally nor dissimilarly proscriptively killing off your former masters. The easiest lethality here comes from deliberate inattentiveness. It’s rather better than just molding shoulder chip’d assumptions that edge out our older generations when we say that they can’t quite get down with what we’re doing when we’re doing it like this; because assuming older generations cannot evolve is also an outdated option of an opinion; a poor choice made for bolstering the argument we take for granted what slower more deliberate versions of our own humanity can’t fundamentally understand nor personally undertake. Think Jimi Hendrix. One’s essential skills and essences have to be at first irefully reprehensible. Then time tells the story again and again and nurtures us in what is tantamount towards accelerating our ability to appreciate more of our subtle aptitudes in our appreciative natures. IYKYK. It’s not always but it’s usually about redefining then doing what one cannot accomplish, and making art from that thing, because we’ve inset each new generation of novelists a deeper internet fluency to work with, or how time’s allowed me to dig deeply and dive deeper into Bob Surace’s Princeton’s Tigers’ digital video and statistical records. In forming personal opinions, bolstered by analytical data and distinct play for play, game by game impressions, I’ve found two truths more real in this entire flash-length triple quarterback era’s game film than anything else: deploying three quarterbacks is exactly as fascinating as it is frustrating, and not because it’s hard to learn, but, primarily? To get it right and rolling and winning every week requires the dammed assumption one’s opponent will not put in all the work to counterattack. Putting in the work is never tougher than when one starts from scratch. Playing defense against Princeton, you would know what the Tigers had coming at your side only once you first accepted you didn’t and wouldn’t know what was happening, until it was happening.
Like the Air Force Academy’s perennial triple-option offense, which is a running and rushing attack using only ground game plays with three set and simultaneous running backs occasionally combined with a scrambling quarterback still ready to sit back and hurl the rare uncorked upfield forward pass to defend as well, Princeton dared all opponents to forget all best laid plans and lessons from all their other games, this for the essential elements of fight or flight and first instincts of their free-associative football minds to be put to a new test. Princeton forced their foes, and then forced even their longtime fans to seemingly, and at random, constantly reconsider how they might constantly adapt. Most every Ivy League team’s coaching staff exhaustively tried resisting affording Surace credibility in this maximization of QB Mob Mentality. Conventional wisdom would argue for weeks, for months, there was no way this wretched triplicating thing would or should or could have ever worked as well as it did.
Surace’s system proved conspiratorially advantageous purchase can be acquired through personal empowerment found only by placing trust in the always presiding unseen of your subjective universe. And to empty one’s self of motivation in order to augment one’s perception? It’s not sure but it could be a thing of a tangential relationship in line with accepting a possibility that your life’s flow’s what some other source has manifested, their inspiration, their rebirth, their twin flame, their love, their devil, their fool, their grand lesson, their overwhelming karma.
If you think you can see what they’re doing, running their offense, they’ll notice you doing so, they’ll see you’ve also adopted an heavier influential hand in its enaction of an even further evolution, and when they’ve finally earned the lighter than some fetahered weightlessness of your obsessive observation, now presiding rent free in your head space and home base and cognitive cathedral, the underworld of your fiction contains the fires of your life-long novelization’s lionizing, it is personal, finally figuring out how you work when you do your best work.
Always in football, the quarterback’ll first have a first, second and third down to work with, always in fiction, the novelist’ll have a first, second and third person voice to select from, so as you play this game by growing your soul to make your voice work in this voice work, know your high-stakes fourth downs are played in a common reader’s mind, where if what you run for the line to gain doesn’t work, then possession of the ball, the page, and a better chance to score and make more points gets turned over, goes forth to another person. Another person with another new set of acrobatic hands acting on behalf of their intuitions’ better reading, perhaps some strange set just like mine, a circus-tent-circumventing set of dukes that believes and has faith they know they can make all they want to have seem like it has to happen on the field the way it should, and, then, too, the way you know it must, a motion of spiritual music and emotional muscle in every personal passage. My writing’s quarterbacking personality sees my novel’s reading as much more than what my reading has pronounced I better produce, it’s more than anything else, like I’m writing a correct, beautiful subconscious body into one’s thought stream, so one learns connections of thought matter far more than karmic plots, wherein one’s undercover capacity for unconditional love is tested vicariously from the start to the end.
Why is this big beautiful black river thought stream so anti-mollycoddling-ly motherfucking unbelievably long-winded? Every piece of my persistent braggadocio’s been set to barricade and bar and preclude my most precious resource, ENTHUSIASM, from jackals, vampires, thieves, and the thespians of the writing community.
Thespians of the writing community whom William Gaddis vehemently indicted, when Gaddis argued that you’ll know them when they tell you what they would like to write, and tell you all about how they want to write what they then don’t write. These thespians are more than likely primarily concerned with what they can use to caper, excuse, explain what’s happened, after they call themselves out in private and then in your confidence for what they won’t explain would explain why they’re not writing. Gaddis was arguing these writing community thespians are more or less too often alleged would-be writers vastly far more fascinated with the peripherals of what it is in the writer’s life, The Writing Life, or the life outside the writing, the social accoutrements that come from what thespians think has to occur when you live a writer’s life chiefly defined by your writing. It was and it is everywhere, what made Gaddis livid, what’s horrifyingly remarkable, that he, nor many of us now, could not see great work from any of our next new greats novelists, due to the crowded overshadowing gluttony our superlative writers must compete with while practicing their passion for, The Sentence, and for, Writing, itself. The crux of this curse is the real writer is often so wrapped up in the writing side of their writing life they often cannot connect with the social parts of the writing world and can even come across as clumsy or socially inept, or worse, not worth your time. And the social performance of the modern writer makes more out of every one of our writing Institutions than is authentically necessary. And when someone assumes they must tell me they’re thinking of writing, because they know I’m a writer, my senses’ll sharpen until for hours upon hours I’m relentlessly embellishing what these other writers have loved to overlook of what’s within their one true style in the way they work their words. This is more than a grand method of saying, through my actions, what I know, is mine, what’s all mine for all y’all, what I’ll write, has to be an alchemical testing to see if all y’all’ve enough enthusiasm, it’s like I’m saying that I’m not saying to one and all that if one doesn’t want to, then don’t worry, but don’t lie about wanting to write. Arguably, I’ll only show you your lies could have been your writing, not lies about your writing. Unintentionally, I’ll spook, ward off, eradicate these empty-handed thespians congratulating themselves for their empty gestural constancy. And now with a paginated personal validation of personal vendetta against ever again pretending I should only want to ascend an asinine Paramount Movies mountain? This is not simply some hill I’m willing to die on. When I say, Red hands quaking? I mean, Lurid earthquakes’ll make mountains.
At all levels of football, one calls an exciting passing play longer than thirty yards, a shot down the field. Most defensive coordinators see this flagrant vote of self-confident offensive audacity, this shot down the field, as a shot at their strategic authority. Whenever Bob Surace’s triple quarterback monster stepped onto the field for any regular play, it was like taking a shot down the field, even on some basic five yard rush up the gut. All season defensive Ivy League coaching staffs tried impressing upon their talented starting defensive stars that they wanted to forgo respect for Surace’s scheme. They wanted to forcibly self-will their older designs, they didn’t want to instead reverse to amend and ameliorate their always revisable coaching methods so they might devise better play calls in order for their defensive position schemes to work out. Ego and pride on the field, displayed within these archaic defensive designs, not anything of talent, nothing near nor close to talent anymore, wanting to pugnaciously insist their wastrel’d perspective was unimpeachably in charge, just because, well, they said so - they wanted to do the same things, along the same lines, that they’d always done on defense.
Barring one exception, all Princeton Tigers opponents came up with nill, no coherent explanations, no clear shots at victory. With F. Scott Fitzgerald’s doppelgänger protagonist nearly one entire century removed from the plot of his infamously booze-soaked-novelization of collegiate gallivanting wherein the real Fitzgerald first proved his hands acrobatic, in a prolific text of fleet prodigy, a clear fluent warming-up for his American classic, The Great Gatsby, the man Hemingway called, “A rummy and a liar,” Fitzgerald’s baroque carrying-on now legion as a definitive emblem and epitomization of true northeastern American dark academia, thereupon Jersey’s hallowed campus, Bob Surace’s demonic Tigers system scored thirty six points per game, trouncing all, apart from one Harvard defense, the rest of a flabbergasted Ivy League.
The authentic sportswriting mind is aggressively encyclopedic, and entertainingly free-associative. Only nothing less than playing god, it’ll bet on its own all-knowing, fully playing mastermind like it is a sport. Grace Knox texts me, “Don DeLillo’s White Noise isn’t what you think it is, because it’s actually about the average allegorical American man’s constantly forgetting his solipsism by narcissistically shoplifting his spiritual rights to unleash unlimited terror from our cavorting and coveting of Magic, Mystery and Dread, just so he maintains dominion over the nuclear family structure. And I think I know well enough by now what you may want me to exclaim. But you won’t ever hear me say, ‘Your Southern novel is a greater and garrulous godsend of neux-gothic for the Church of the NFL.’ You think I should know I know I’ll have to declaim what I won’t admit, ‘I can’t stop you from what you’re doing.’”
Grace Knox knows how to throw wistful paint at the wall. Yet I wonder if anyone ever went out of their way, took some considerable time out of their lives, to somehow teach her how to throw a football. In some circles, this specific dexterity is as important as one developing a clear and sturdy penmanship. To some I know I respect and revere, vital acrobatic hands are all we have. Although the wattage of her whimsical fingertip’d whipsawing is as flimsy as it is invigorating, her claims reek of a deleterious set-up. Like she’s only setting out some trap to catch me at finding her points of view totally inassimilable. What is being fly? What typifies delusion we feel most, more honorable? The charming? The sincere? The useful? The lucrative? The confusing? The gracious? The font face, Electra? Playing any kind of game? The idea of having game?
I don’t respond with, “What I’m doing eludes low-bar expectations entirely. I’m not writing a novel, as much as I’m writing a new canon for all y’all to face. And getting away with it, is what it is, when and if your opposition admits you’re on the right path for being wrong for that.”
During the first American football game, Princeton and Rutgers played a type of Mob Soccer. On November sixth eighteen sixty nine, in a nasty New Brunswick, New Jersey mud field, one hundred jacketed spectators are said to have witnessed a new style of contest. Played first with guidelines from the London Football Association, twenty five players per side were not allowed to carry or hold a brown rounded ball, but they could kick and swat and club and bat and knock the ball onward and toward their opponent’s goal using just about anything on their body like their legs and hands and heads and chests and abdomens and feet. The competition resembled a current English Premiere League football match much more than our modern American college football. In countless North American continental mythologies and myths and folklores, felines represent spiritual guardians of and guides in the underworld. In its first instantiation, football was a bloody mess. The rules of the game didn’t matter much. It was just about one side proving itself stronger, smarter, tougher than the other one. The only rule was that there were ten games played in the total game. Rutgers beat Princeton: six to four.
I’ve bettered my ability to block out unnecesary peripheral visions. When I’m writing, working, I’ll make sure nothing matters more to me during any of the day, nor tonight, tomorrow, than the way I’m one with the way I’m working within the sentence. And I’ve since ten years ago yesterday believed your sentences will show you your story once you respect what your language always tells you about yourself. Rewriting the story of one’s overarching stories matters more when you admit that if you smoke the right stuff you can taste your memories. Princeton dubiously claims their football team owns an unmatched twenty eight national football championships. Undubioulsy, Yale’s claimed eighteen, while Alabama says they own sixteen national titles, defying Princeton’s math, officially, these national title totals stand up better than what the Tigers claim to possess, because the NCAA’s only officially affirmed a fraction of the twenty eight titles the Tigers say they’ve earned, just fifteen titles stand legitimately unchallenged. Yet this explosively, Well-you-weren’t-there-when-I personal self-editing, this experimental kind of, I-was-always-better-than-this-because-I-can-rewrite-your-memories-for-you seems like it falls exclusively into perfect alignment with the constantly megalomaniacal self-congratulations of a Princeton-type-pedigree that the average American alcoholic musters in an effort to maraud all doubt they’ve ever even done but one thing wrong. IYKYK.
Extremely calming and incredibly relaxing is any overconfident intoxication, the intoxicating belief, I do know, that you’ve always been far better than you were actually special at anything, playing football, coaching football, drinking, arguing about sports, being a literary friend, getting free drinks out of friends, making your friends’ friendships feel like you’re getting free drinks. I’ve had many former and real and true and fake and great fake-sugar-coating conversationalists of a feigned close-association-ship daftly accuse me of adoring and openly sporting theoretical thought patterns of linguistic elitism. A thing I know many of my old basic bar-stool-dominating friends today would still assume constitutes a brain-breaker. Let’s see what you think about why I would want to harp on this, if hammered, or were I with any of all y’all now, I’d have to openly admit I love the Surace triple quarterback option strictly on the grounds of how and why I can think of no good reason why any football coach’d want three quarterbacks on the field at once. That’s the brain-breaker, three gunslingers in the backfield at once’ll just always eliminate your extra pass catchers. With rare exception, we know, all quarterbacks almost always throw any pass to another player because the quarterback knows other players are far more swift and clever and agile and crafty and powerful while advancing the ball than they are, not to mention they’re usually farther upfield than the passer. In fact, a team is at its best when a specifically pass-catching player is at his best, because he’s investing all his full effort in any short time frame to maximize the way in which he will continue to soon more efficiently maximize opponent territory gains. Ask, Are three quarterbacks on the field a revamped opponent territory gaining system? Hell no if doing so removes possible hyper-efficient scoring routes run by an extra running back, a third tight-end, a fifth wide receiver. Three quarterbacks on the field presents an unreasonable and unusual and unnecessary amount of extra work for multiple offensive players. And you can’t well imagine why someone’d want to do this to win. Behold why this idea works.
I text Grace Knox back with, “Does every American artist know or believe on some level that their craft is their best emotional preparation for becoming a parent? That their art says they’ll do all of this other stuff outside of what they do for money? Isn’t that obnoxiously beautiful?”
Grace Knox says, “A writer is always at war with his obvious other realities when he wants to be seen hard at work by women he admires.”
Gunner texts me, “Why does our authentically original story often warrant only one obsequious kind of comparison with the cookie cutter? Why bifurcate story types? Break it down with what’s worked before, set it against this one newly made for your eyes? It’s denigrating. It’s a basic bitch thing to do, if you’re implying disfavor can be safely vouched for, when raucously original writing’s caged within labels clearly leaning on isolating more original writing’s natural itch apart from all other writing. Experimental? Experimental writing? Experimental, is what you’ll say about the original thought flow’s intriguing form. Someone’ll say how we’ve never seen this before, like it’s a bad thing. It’s about as mean as speaking poorly of ambition. High praise? Ambition? Commended sarcastically. Ambition doesn’t receive unnecessary attention if original work doesn’t look sloppy. If cookie cutter cadres can’t make sense of a story’s gist? When nothing similar’s available for a thoughtlessly handy rendition of best value explanations via undemanding commonality comparisons? Horrible. High time we chop down all our dastardly over-simplified this-is-what-we’ve-had-and-said-about-what-we’ve-had-so-this-is-what-we’ll-have-to-say-we-have-here decision trees. I don’t want our literary analysis in session to sound like anything we’ve argued before.”
I respond, “Did you grow up working in retail, resenting how easy it was for your bosses to deploy, Sell What’s Available Today? SWAT?”
Who would want to make music with a deaf man? The vibration. When we know we’ve used architectural syllabication for some purpose we know another mind cannot fathom, we are often woefully unaware of what insightful disinformation we’ve assigned our words’ structuring. A reader might argue against what one’s saying in one’s disinforming code, avoiding empathy, after an explanation, by suggesting that what one word literally means is all of what one word is ever supposed to do, simply stating, As it stands, this is what this means. Have all y’all noticed my animadversion towards this ennunciation? What I’m asking, What if we set the word, the thing, in motion, and turn the letters on? Look into the way the letters run through their neighboring figures as they make their made-of-meaning’d offspring? Then it’s like we’re digging through the inside of the non-static standstill of a neon sign. A triplicating made-meaning’d may be what makes our words all crystalline animal again.
So one single sensational potentially perilous Ivy League regular  season be dammed, college football writers looking back can affirm that no matter what? We’ve together learned cloddish old school-ish football assumptions are at once archaic and they’re also affirmably theoretically astute, and mostly correct, beyond Surace’s iconoclasm’s revealing their pitfalls for one full season’s sustained period of time. And, that, college football truths are singular things that can exist in two universes at once. Before these newly revised, to account for Surace’s system, old-school college football ideologies were eventually affirmed, after a long and doubtlessly legendary off-season of Surace again reevaluating just about everything of his offense to gain another edge, finished successfully challenging all of the Ivy League’s established college football coaching authorities, let’s agree we can declare the total ambition of the original effort should get lumped and bundled together under the auspice of, this thing proving we can always revise everything we can agree upon about the spirit of the sport and what we can say about college football history. And we should also agree, Surace’s successful Cerberus influence shows how and when and if we see popular opinions growing too popularized? Too popularized to the point where almost all other apparent experts in a field of study or sport cannot stop blathering on about nor responding critically to what’s exotic? We must then, assume, they’re really saying Surace has proven his brain-breaker play calling’s an entirely successful endeavor, because he’s imposed a new contextual and subtextual style. The oppositions knew there was no way to ignore what they couldn’t think of forgetting, a winning argument, that opponents cannot play an entire game, let alone convincingly win any game against a Surace offense, and forever never again anymore win any game against Surace by only using the prior learned benefits of their passed-down yet too popular defensive football play calling methodology, or, simply, playing the way they did before they walked into a world defined by Surace’s set of plays, Surace’s settings, Surace’s scenes as he conditioned a climate so no others are in any way ever able to look good, nor actually act and play it, safely popular, after Surace adjusted the atmospherics. Others have to address, and play against Surace’s particular strategy, and they can’t play the way they wanted to before they saw what he was doing. Opponents’ve no choice but to take seriously an effortlessly enhancing triple QB system, and within minutes playing where he wants them, and doing what he wants, when they’re doing what he wants, he knows he can do what he wants.
Your novel’s voice work’s an offensive system, scoring points-made upon the cancelled ears and eyes of personal ego of your present reader. Great readers play and set out great defensive schemes by commenting on a writer’s written actions in the physical space of a page. And, too, great readers always know their necessary adjustments’ll become more clear when they see what they need to do more of or less of in their commentary when this becomes their writing. Writing is usually their primary planned purpose of action after their reading. And based on what happens in their reading great readers become great when they make what they want to do on defense, in reading, eventually make them that much better playing offense, in their writing later, if they can learn how to adapt to any kind of writing. So your novel’s voice work shouldn’t only do what one or some thing or similar song’s already been performed or accomplished when making plays for points-made, when the voice work is competing for game time, deep concentration, the undivided attention against your reader’s defensive internal monologue. The greatest, or at least my favorite novels that I give room to and afford unbegrudging deference, allude to this chromium’d hubris as a sacred substance, a special thing. A rare thing of compelling conviction that I’ll now go so far as to say is in its air time exactly what the voice work of your novel can never hide, great, good, bad, awful, indifferent, about the truth of your novel’s voice work actually knowing what I know about what knowing really sounds like when it is rife in your writing, and what knowing always sounds like in any kind of right writing. When I know I see and hear what happens when a writer knows what they’re doing? I never do not know when or if I’ve just seen it. IYKYK. And just the very same, the American Alcoholic also knows this identification process as well, where as countless others have said before what I’ll say now, If you spot it? Then you probably got it. Ask, Are you completely confident you can always spot it cold? Yes? Then you know how having it forbids, limits opportunity, inhibits non-pointless thoughtful experimentation. Experimentation in empathy knows there’s a right way to write the right way, and you must know how to know it when you see it. The ancients called their books, woods. Out hunting your recombinant combinations in your own forest, try asking, every other hour, on the page, if your text argues any person inset its skeletons of flexibilities’d know your passages do show the truth, or, how, underneath everything we’ve all never not got any at our unlimited disposal of every excuse for any new idea. You should’ve included every crystalline animal and excluded every trunk of branching inhibition so then what is of your art is what’s in our writing pure proliferating proof that all our options remain wide open within this physical space. You won’t want to work without an assumption that anything can happen. And if you answer, No, this is folly. Then prove why, the same as how I can prove why I’ve brought out sporting theories tacitly tabbed as malicious brain-breakers from atop humble sportsman barstools. I’m comparing the novelist to the quarterback by proving the only kind of college football coach worth talking about must resort to the spirit animal embodied by the dipsomaniac’s magical thinking. I’ve since I began known I would always assume outsiders to my thoughts would want to show me they’d only want to treat me and mine like a Slugg of a Surace personality, until the one day, before knowing what’s happening, I’m the bloodorange thoughtboxcuttering outsider you know you cannot possibly ignore. Breaking everyone’s boxed thoughts? Trust me: they’ll try setting you up so they get away with their soon-to-be colossal failings, if and when they try coming for your head, when they will try arguing but likely’ll fail to prove beyond their envy of your mastery why you deserve their invention’s invective, when they try to take you out back to take you out. These are those too that’d claim some slippery high ground by highlighting their noble attempts at drowning the ocean in a bathtub, these are those arguing against your extra work, arguing against your ocean of energy coming ashore in black river runs. Doing this they’ll admit they’re only taking all y’all to task when they won’t say your work was always much too aggressively making waves, and that this is why you’ve been stabbed in the back and then Southern suckerpunched seven ways from every single NFL Sunday, Super Bowl included. Know that the armchair quarterback is an average man? How often must I concoct helpfully divine allusions I know’ll assist all those around me daily refusing to come off the addled comforts of their all-consuming addiction to low level fears and deep tertiary terrors? What if I let them sort it out on their own time? Since if you’ve believed you’ve been right all along and you’re correct, nothing your outide oppoitional forces do to your enegry will do anything beyond make you stronger, and whatever they waylay all y’all with won’t work the way they want, apart from at times altering your thinking about their thinking, while also making you a far greater and much better-at-reading-writer. You’ve thought this one through, so take this next advisory-style criticism to mean we’ve broken at least one chain of code. Good or bad, you’ve processed one of my major choices, we’ve contextually rewritten a consciousness rewriting over the top of a textual aneurism through totally systematizing Bob Surace’s offense in a novel. We’ve also already agreed on another major thing, a rewritten textual aneurism encourages an ear-splitting, so we might mark off the time from here and now against the old way one used to use their words.
In this spiritual recovery we’ve taken any and all personally complex, algorithmically reinforced self-confidence, straight down through what’s depthless and scuddable into passage upon passage unto inestimably deeper and better deeply perceived possible convergences of dirge upon fathom upon league in the all too brief time it’ll take for a complacently anonymous acronym, QB, to completely disappear through the black, blank, beyond-cold personal ocean bottom of your conscious thoughts. With no light shot through what’s now the ocean of time spent rewriting your reality, you’re aswim. Now astir? Are you alive here in the void? What are you? What are you doing? Distracted? Again? Redirected? Have you pulled away from your previous plans because you let someone else have your own say-so to forge what forms their literary lines? Did all y’all erroneously believe all y’all saw all possible on-field action at all times? How many sweeping zagging moves of athletic bliss did these blindly uninhibited Surace Tigers make in one season to make progress? An uncountable amount, or I’d say it depends on how you count the scores of points made to account for your not anticipating how you might expect every emerging and kinetic triple entendre. Are you in a three-piece ensemble? Or suited for conducting an orchestra? These are the breaks and these are the jags. Your lines you’ve let others come across and your thresholds broken through’ve largely depended on the talent of your defensive retinal sweeps. Are you watching the way the letters dance? The modern NFL proves new colorful truths about what’s wrong with the way we think about all these things if we think we understand everything. “QB” stands for much more than quarterback. And this evening? QB? It’s three things together; passer, runner, and the distraction from and of truly credible threats. All of that to say this, I trust my deepest of deeply dark gut feelings implicitly. And I think King, Ozzie and Gunner worked together to push Grace Knox over the edge into the river that night in question, because they believe but would never admit they think that an earth-shatteringly beautiful physical person, Grace Knox, is the type of person who deserves none of the success of what a great novel can do for the life of the novelist. And though their attempted murdering of their classmate, Grace Knox, by assisting in her near fatal near suicide attempt was mostly fiction until it wasn’t, I can hardly manage to begin to work on without doubting that all of my closest ties in Freemasonville want to destiny-swap with my own success. I can eliminate my paranoia if I make great headway on progress towards my best pass at perfection. If I run this triple threat option to ground I can defeat all doubt. You must submit yourself to your imagination’s subjectification - and it must use all of what you are for its best practices, so when you’ve mastered the monster of your mayhem, you become a manic Merlin verbalized.
Tonight, in a King Charlemagne-led group text featuring, Ozzie, and Gunner and I, King is reporting live and direct from the actual underground within The Mermaid’s red basement, and I say, “This is about unpaid and paid attention. What distinctions make a difference? Different phases, different stages, different faces. Can you show me how to embrace your entire reality’s feel from forming nothing but what is a luscious personality? What is the work for us before you show us what you’ve been working on? Still more work without interloping subjective visions overlapping your shaping of, The Immortal? What happens when you know your safety exists only because you’ve accepted some boring other version of the way you should live your life? Who do you tell that you know that they’re wrong about what works? Why have you trained yourself to not fully embrace exponential alien growths in your personality’s self-defined essentialisms? They’re all evolving right before your eyes, stations of an unsaid insight, fresh, formed in divine timing.”
Ozzie responds to the group text, “If my paragraphic preparation gets too frantically fantastic? It murders all creational charge. I want my printed pages to pop like exigent prayers, show how the light in my eyes has become infinite and flaming but apportioned so well it’s kept safely in the pocket, a blue-fire bottom of a perpetually butane-plump Zippo. I want the writing’s body to have a personality and the opinion it knows that I’ve made the most of it, made it better just by my being there, because when you or I do not or cannot believe in what we can or will know we’ll do correctly while we’re immersed in the big moment, one’ll not then execute a present situation-specific strategy without thinking. Success is a sly showman, layering its surfeit when not forced to subsist.”
And then Ozzie freely demands some more of our open attention paid by saying to us, “Constantly newer nearly every day for having had your personal experiences, you already know you accept some version of yourself. It has survived coming from and out of your life. Now alive, through reflections on your friendships, relationships, situationships, and whatever our comments on each other’ve really meant, and really, really meant to each other once safe in our secluded silence afterwards, whatever’s lost and what’s here have all seemed to’ve combined with this moment and made it into the making of meaning. This message, these textual venting sessions, this impromptu volcanic voicing, is not in the mind any typical problem. Many of these questionable behaviors I’ve exhibited, I’ve excised? Show off how better writing is for me the affront’s proving I can demoralize myself to atavistically dematerialize any other’s ideas of me, so that then I sufficiently regather my courage.”
Gunner says, “Cold blooded murder of your confidence-killing.”
King says, “Have any of all y’all ever seen wildlife footage of a golden eagle sneaking up on and then dragging a mountain goat off a cliff face, until the billy plummets onto the rocks below for an easy kill? Here in two paragraphs you’ve feasted on an old unfeasible insecurity.”
I respond, “Not going to say you’re, ‘Right,’ because being, ‘Right,’ doesn’t matter so much, when what I want to say is that I think, ‘This is great,’ because I like knowing I don’t really know where you’re going. You’ve mostly outsmarted your mind’s perception of the unpredictable.”
King responds, “Exactly. Original. Excellent.”
Gunner says, “A wizard at work.”
I say, “More or less a man made of Merlin.”
King says, “Where did this formulation first come from?”
Ozzie says, “Everyone sure we should plunge down this rabbit hole? It’s gonna feel like I’m water-boarding all y’all before resurfacing.”
I text Ozzie directly so he’s no down time to decide he’s unwanted, “Now just say something, say it fast, when you’re sure they want you to share. Make their minds up for them when it’s your turn and watch you work their thrusting progress through your sky miles while their wings work. Your responding hype’ll help our hell-raising ravens raise up.’”
Ozzie texts us, “In David Foster Wallace’s Consider the Lobster, near the end of his exquisite essay-length book review of the sports star memoir he’s recently finished, DFW declares the best modern athletes are better than their contemporaries only when they become the best at refusing all thought during competition. His opening ideas conclude in his closing argument with what brought him into this memoir, how he first began reading this athlete’s memoir aspiring for his own systematic reconstruction of what it takes to hash out an athletic breakthrough. But he’s left at a loss because there is no thoughtfulness represented in this thing at all, knowing our goals are part of a lost cause, his forgoing any and all chance that this athletic eureka comes together, he uses this and he here wants us also feeling, so he can feel he’s convinced, he’s to have achieved alternative enlightenment, one of his own devising, in his now successfully forging an all new awareness of athletics from producing his poor opinion of what he’s read in the star athlete’s memoir. So of course it’s an illogically backhanded slam in that by praising his empathic lack of hope in learning what he’s wanted to know he’s learned he’s maybe the best at using less than compassion for ironically earning more of our entertainment, playing the lines like this same aforementioned athlete. And it is eventually entertaining, and enormously entertaining to know our athletes actually know what they have to do is incomprehensible. And that athletes have to master the unthinkable in order for their achieved and greater future athletic success. What’re you supposed to do to win big matches and games at the highest level of competition? Name the unimaginable, only in your action. You let successful skills speak in their actions by letting them go, a newly broken levy rushing into, happening, when it’s happening, you can’t stop that kind of thing.”
I respond, “Please, continue, please, go on.”
Ozzie says, “It’s like the drunk text that gets better disguised by the unrelenting success of the deftly applied autocorrection technology. I want to be more than sure I’m freely becoming my very best idea, self, writer, version, player, athlete, competitor. I know I want my writing working in a state of mind-play where I combine my competitive thoughtless thoughtfulness with my written work, so I’m convinced it’s a kind of writing where my every motion of each move’s an inevitably choreographed elite decisive-looking element I don’t once have to think about. I don’t want you to read my mind before you read my writing. I’ll come across original only when you say you can’t guess where I’m going but you know enough to know you will not once know where I’m coming from. So I’m saying what I want to know is that I’m saying when my pure skill is at its best? It’s better than your reflex. It’s a result you must comprehend. This is winning before a single point gets iterated.”
We know Ozzie believes he’s got a really good point. We know he knows how to criticize himself, and his writing, especially well. But can he show us he knows how to praise himself critically too? While he’s working to thread his ideologues throughout our writer’s room’s new trustworthy untetheredness? Ozzie’s personal free-association fusillade feels in this one message like no far cry from what we’ve all agreed and said we want to grow within our writing in our sessions in my office. It’s like we’ve got more than one group conscience in our work, because we don’t pretend we agree on what constitutes, The Exemplary.
Earlier this week, I said, “Super fine prose is a specialized moral linguistically expressed set of emotional standards.” Yet our greatest and greater sessions are far better when and where all said and spoken for and brought in in our writing is of one miraculous mindfulness, as though the multiplicitous has always had the correct balance in our contributions, so the writing after the correct vibe in the right writing session is a reflection on how this version of theoretical rigor takes apart and subverts the and-then-what-happened-next variety of story I know I’d never admit I could if I wanted, endure forever. Sessions in my office reinforce our fiction’s rupturing from reality. Together we’ve fashioned a glow-up of literary gamesmanship since we’ve freed our subconscious talk within our writing from the useless fear of finding succinct logical personal flair from out of nowhere. No more is the random piece of joy repulsive to the journeyed imaginary journalist. A belief in the better benefits of spontaneity, is in essence, an accelerant, is more inclusively propulsive than anything made from or out of only our explicit sound.
I text back, “You have to show your colors as though for centuries you’ve known you’re only here because you’re hailed to harpoon chaos from above the underworld, the lunar half below what you’re revolving. Until you unloose your obsessions in what you know you’re writing, you’ll worry over instead of using for your personal gain the thick brisk thought upon thought of one ball of controlled chaos before another.”
Grace Knox texts me, “Mia said she thinks you think your life proves how all upcoming, upstart, master stylists must always, though they all know they need not ever truly be to actually feel blue sky satisfaction from every by all turns bulleting sterling sentence’s future promise, be vetted by the first rungs of a moderate internet popularity before any source of true literary power pays close attention enough to begin your working within their version of vauntedness’s verification.”
I say, “Why does Mia want you to believe you should think the only literary path to progress is comprised of the eloquent thirst trap?”
Grace Knox says, “At least it’s better than the race to the absolute bottom of human sympathy. Why do I win big if you feel bad for me?”
Ozzie says, “The real competitors know all the work they’ve done in private eventually comes to the light. Your work, before it becomes what you’ve worked on, has to show your sense of the room’s perception of a version of you without overtly elaborating on how you know of what you’re speaking on. It’s a thoughtfulness coming from more than just what you’ve observed works for you in front of polite company. You must not hide your day’s windfall from unspoken outside competitors, even when you’re too close to all of those more or less listening too close to gauge or adore what anchors your popularity by pursuing your writing’s position before you emerge from your mind’s breadth and scope. You have to know you’ll know what you’re writing.”
I respond, “If you know, you know you can’t let your self show you know, you know, Salinger’s keyboard demons were irascibly innocent.”
Ozzie says, “My intuition is trapped in a proscriptive auguring.”
I respond, “It’s where you, Ozzie, can not only dig in both your heels, but also steadfastly reconstitute, on grounds so far sight unseen, how you plan to later plan to plant many, many more flags for a fresher fiction as you flee your first, demonically dogmatic outside influences. Bill Parcels is world-renowned for almost exclusively introducing the concept of coaching situational football in his NFL practices. Know the score, know the down and distance, make impossible outcomes positive likelihoods from the select competitive situations you don’t have to think about every single Sunday, since now you know them through practicing them every day, so you don’t doubt your sense of direction.”
I can only ask myself so I text myself a non-drunk and then so way over the top zodiac download styled inquisition series, “Have I had my texts collect a projection of a new confidence in every word I’ll have Ozzie hand over to me? Am I assuring him of one thing in particular? That wherever the work wanders, he should be sure to feel and believe I’ll carefully, constantly, optimistically, estimate he’ll complete his wayward thoughts no matter the ambulation’s ambition? Should he feel he’s never guaranteed to fall face-first in the future, even when he gets lost in his sentences? Maybe he can assume or anticipate he has a sound and structured stability in all his moving and motion and mind? Assuming that I can see he’s producing value from the fodder of his never standing still, here we’ve now an Ozzie-fied genre aflourishing from down under the fact that if he can value clarity he can show he almost always has a good point I too can benefit from, and then he’s in possession of a priceless litany of great arguments I admire the scope of, and that I adore the hustle and the hoop-jumping he’s evoked, because since not only has Ozzie mostly reverse-engineered outdated strings of thought on literary tennis talk at the table, he’s craftily, commendably commenced the sharpening of his modern hot take sensibilities. He wields a blade in his breath work. There is primarily a personal progress prevalent within his depictions. Even if the growth can be measured by only fictionally and fractionally and marginally remarking upon the remaking of his improving upon DFW’s hypothetically and theoretical professional tennis perceptions, I’ll also admit, again and again, I feel phenomenal if I declare tonight and in the future: it’s impossible to not now affirm Ozzie’s DFW-inflected deductive expansions worthwhile, because he’s clearly improving his knack for making more of what good things he makes happen in all of what he does with what he’s reading.”
And since I sent the message and loved living in the charge it took I next make it my obligation to give myself a thoughtful response, “So what if none of this textual repurposing’s really very good for our sessions’ habits, because we’re too comfortable handing Ozzie what we think he needs, confidence, while glossing over gruesomely gratuitous contradictions his theories have expostulated? Yes, the group message was first initiated by our desire to know we could stick to our original downtown-observing plan of only texting each other to document the night’s action of comings and goings and preparations for the inbound hurricane, Hurrication, hurricane parties. But I can’t and I won’t ask Ozzie to redirect nor refocus. I should know by now I’ve almost always much preferred to let our days be aimless with no advancing plan of action, so the pressure of our primes feels not fecklessly affected by the presence of all happening right here, right now, rather instead it is perhaps strategically and lightly strafed by our eccentrically induced stresslessness. What’s more, I’m not adding anything to Ozzie’s other miseries, since I know I’m criticizing myself so often I hardly find I need to refine the improvised self-made lessons I glean from my core group’s controlled-by-me-self-discovery. I’m otherwise not doing much other than chain-smoking throughout these frantically too clean nights.”
And it’s fine. Be where your feet are, right now. From four different spots, Ozzie, Gunner, King and I are noting and tracing the traffic flows in and around The Mermaid’s lunar complected parking lot. And then I double message the group, “Accepting pressure from your competitive instinct means you’ll do the work in your words and your world until the words shift your perspective of what you proclaim has become your visibly printed work for the world, so the world knows your work represents far more than only your kind of world in words.”
And I think I hope I’m coming across only one jot more than fly.
Ozzie says, “Only after may yours become a true visionary text.”
Deathly hard to come across elegant, no matter your beauties, when asking someone or anyone you respect for any kind of validating, or some suggestion you’re approaching your target, especially in regards to all the maddening yet rewarding work of getting-off-into-the-weeds from the first so one provides iterations of an internal path for the mind of the text, or however one describes what attributes one desires during their writing’s rigorous mental completion, it’s here on some sacrosanct level of personality, it’s once I’m doubling back again, only after I’ve retrofitted all of my just now alchemized doubt for the gold of boosted confidence, am I at least sort of sure I’ve applied every individual iota of right-minded motivation I’ve at my disposal. Deadlines are best defined by however long I spend digging myself out of my own better bear trap, so I can breath, deadlines are not unimportant, they are misunderstood.
Grace Knox double texts me, “The time I spend thinking about you when you’re not around gives me the unguessable advantage of knowing in which ways and precisely how I’ll approach you when I see you again. Never not unnerving for everyone, except for anyone who already does this work with everyone’s minds in mind. And of all those souls that don’t? They’d never say, point-blank, bluntly, I hope I never see you again. But by departing another’s presence, like yours, I’m instead suggesting that what I think of you will regrow, mostly with you in mind, essentially silently planning for planting a socialite’s seedling. Soon I’ll tell you, I can make anyone admit they want to talk to you.”
I respond, “There are slightly perceptible yet major differences between what you want to have, plus what is there, and then what you have the talent to make happen, so it is there. Ask, What are you seeing when you ask yourself if you’re seeing what’s actually within your work?”
Then King texts me directly, outside Ozzie’s dominating our larger group message, “To no one should I admit I’ve for too long adored the conditions of my mind and any vehicle during unsafe driving. This is a personal thing. A task to be not taken lightly in solitude. This is like a psychotic kind of road-head for my neurochemistry. But not real road-head. It’s drunk driving, high driving, crossfaded driving, whatever neurochemical emotional verve and color you want to call it. Am I going to die drunk behind the wheel of a four thousand pound torpedo if I don’t quit doing it? Then why can’t I stop? Don’t you do this too?”
Tactfully, I respond, “That’s a fucking loaded question and a half.”
But then Mia texts me, “I’ll hear no mystery only some naked muck within every single overused English piece of language or phrasing if it resounds like, That’s a loaded question. Like if it’s near your initial or first time hearing, That’s a loaded question, then it is a USC red-yellow combination. Yet for the synesthesiac’s emoted noting on my end, here, after seeing it said something like seventeen thousand times, That’s a loaded question, seems much favored but also worthy of wearing contradictory emotings, so the bloated letters come across chopped and screwed into no total oblivion, but still some kind of spumy and purple luminousness, not so far beyond avoiding a perfect comparison to Cam’ron’s Purple Haze’s album cover. Empurpling here proves true some part of the suggestion in saying, There’s more than meets the eye, like it must also be something we’ve heard far too many times, heard so much, grown so numb to, we’ve forgotten we’ve gotten it handed out to us from those we should only ever call, the blind. What this maybe must mean to you by now, if you’ve made it this far, is that there’s far more truth thrashing within even a false narrative of the way words work than what those openly lying have the power to give out.”
I say, “Is there an entire group message exchange, featuring me as its subject, sent between you, King, Ozzie, Gunner and Grace? Have entire collections of sports bar bartenders ever debated in a group text whether or not they should show me the door when I forget not every one of them loves hearing my sports hot takes? Maybe, maybe not, and maybe I’m not concerned, or maybe I should care. Somehow, since my head’s clearing out one more minor moribund mote each day, I’m more confident, comfortable, saying I understand the assignment. Do all y’all? What’s considered classic is always clarified by what’s current. What’s timeless is always contrasted and changed by what’s comparably termed, contemporary. What’s what matters most? Why does what matters most matter more than what may matter more to all y’all? Most writers come alive when you give them adoration. Most of my favorite writers come alive when you give them argument on the grounds of knowing they’re digging for the gritty potential of an abnormal approval level, like that of all-time supremacy. Our great American novelists have a taste for the monumental, and don’t want to die in battle. They want the kind of attention that wars with how you alter your eternity.”
Mia texts me back fast, “Paranoia’ll present the perfect place for monologue. For instance? If ever you’re going to deliberately not hear me, I’ll for starters deliver everything you need to have said. You could have read what that last line connotes one of two ways. Who is listening when you speak, is it you or me? What you’ve taken for granted is what you’ll take home, what you’ll know in time you have to take to heart.”
I respond, “Ozzie, Gunner and King don’t already know I’ve defenestrated my once far too actionably hairfooted adoration for bottles, cans and growlers. No matter when they find me out, I know I can say to them I’ve known since the summer I desperately need JACK LIVES HERE to look very different. I’ve heard so many, many people tell me, Getting sober alchemizes desperation until it stands in defiance to a disease of the body, mind and spirit. I think I believe, that I think I believe staying sober is much more about marshaling the maintenance of an emotional sobriety for my soul’s consciousness than it is ever, internally, interpersonally, or performatively about sending my already overwrought, warped and delusionally intoxicating idea of my self into the artificial skunkwork labyrinths of self-loathing shame. Kill the minotaur by never taking a step? You starve it without taking sharp, short shots of harder and stronger liquor. In the dark? I’d love to insist I’m arguing my red hands, though quaking’ll never need nails, only the prints I was born with for this constant problem solving state of mind. I won’t get any better if I say I’m done improving all the ways I’m taking myself to hell and back for what I did while drinking uncontrollably.”
Mia responds, “You need to know things you don’t need proof for, you’re more than what you’ve done in the life before you had this one. You should tell yourself you’re additionally worthy of your best efforts. You should tell yourself, Whosoever’s texting me while I’m exuberantly drunk meets with a spiritual experience.”
I respond, “You should be telling yourself, I’ve accepted what I call verifiable excellence in my writing must not now at this stage dig for the elicitation of the ideal reader’s insecurities via intimidating dialects nor polysyllabic diatribe. For if the writing is honest? It must reveal one complicated truth, first, your writing’s authentic personality must not misunderstand why it is so enthused by the exotic possibility of a lifetime beyond this lifetime. And if you work in a soothsaying survival instinct so very strong that it is in its inflection always approaching immortality, one has to answer, How do I best enhance the rainbow’d derangement of the hallucination abridging my realm and yours? By explaining the first thing to know’s what it means to disagree with the way you live, how I know you know that that means two things at once.”
I text Grace Knox, “The Lady Madonna from In the Men’s Room of the Sixteenth Century is just madness that instructs, offers, conducts salvation.” Only so I don’t say what I want to but won’t say because I’ll sound paranoid if I do say, “If my courage complicates all y’all’s lives? Then shall I assume the answer to the question, Are they all talking about me all the time, is, yes? Well you have to lead the way in your work or you’re going to be murdered by your own hostile reactions to other peoples’ good decisions. Change is complicated, some of us perceive change as trauma. Stability, by virtue of being well-balanced, scares away fear-fueled emotional teetering’s favorite thing, tossing off calming ropes to nosedive for comfort in firebrand catastrophe. Deeper, greater changes are uncommonly devotion-centric in our private lives, where for entire, often consecutive days, nights, for some of us complete half-decades or more, we must moment-to-moment prove ourselves to ourselves just in order to chalk up what we’re doing in these arts to the forming of a perspective shift that’s more than credibly sure it’s all been worth it, all been a success. If my everything reads right and I think it’s right? Eventually I’ll feel a far greater psychological and physical and literary psychic homeostasis. No demons will distract me. Our greater lines are achieved through much more than occasionally responding to the pressure of dire, imagined faults by our musing on and using what can become of one’s mind and body and soul through fearless love.”
Grace Knox responds, “Honestly intrepid hearts are too often afraid of what they’re capable of should they believe they know anything is possible,” thus mirroring me to me better than I thought she could.
Gunner texts me outside our original group message, “What happens to us when everyone believes, right or wrong, that they have wings, because they think they own a burning bush? Isn’t this notion one formidably too far from our source energy? From thirty thousand feet, won’t any and all burning bush luminosity’ll seem unrenderable? What do I do but get closer? Even if I know getting closer means skillfully skydiving this enormous distance daily to catch and carve out a glimpse in words of what it was once in one’s original witnessing of this supra light. I learn, here in the return to great heights, on the page later, one’s better off cancelling doubt and sounding not only convincing, but authenticated by showing and proving the strength of their declarations, like, Yes, in fact, I can show you when you’ll know you’ve had a better look. This entirely verbose personal showing seems like some massive portion of the threshold of fiction itself. Personal psychic power is one of the only things we know that compares to the heart hardening heft in the suckerpunch of self-inflicted pain. Choose yourself, soon enough, you see why you’ve got to get over these old authorial relationships with your own work if you want to write what at once works for you, works out for you. I tell myself, Literature is an ocean. It’s nearly universal without the work of what makes up your contribution already. So don’t merely go down with the others on some plane just in order to begin plunging these fathoms and the depths. Or do. But punch out a window or cut a hole in the side, and find some other way out. It’s circuitous, self-sacrifice to secure the self’s salvation. However, if you find you want what you rely on to be the realest real light of your real lines? Then you’ll find you’ll have to rely on knowing you’ll always be the only one you know that for sure wants the sublime to come out of your own readability, where you actually feel your respiration’s thoughtfulnesses. Breathing underwater isn’t unoriginal when you first test it on yourself. The lines of your life, hard at work with your real mind light, makes the ocean of your literature more natural. It comments on the tools of the blue glow of all insufficiently liquid-illusory soul-crystalizing display. Your ownership of your ocean and flow means your underworld is more than another underwood, it’s not scrub. It is relentlessly growing now that your screens flood your thought streams with an outrageously exorbitant neurochemical level you know you’d have been fine without. And what I want is to know I write well when I want my written work to stand as so much more than another novelization of a digital screen as a computer as an atomic bomb, each flash seems like a detonation or an explosion and an exposure of my mind. I want exposure to me to be exposure to discrediting what I once erroneously believed was greater than what we can do for ourselves.” He’s got all this coming at me, I think, because yesterday Gunner also, “textually confided,” in me he thinks, “On our American face is writ-large our dominant faith in waste. Think of the glory in the All-American ways we waste our lives. If you and I look far and wide? Wastefulness is demonstrated the world over. I’ve known people that think they care for you because they’ll somehow forever believe, since they’ve in the past come to your emotional rescue, possibly, more than once, they’ve beyond anything they might do now, earned some terribly unlimited personal position of free social passage at all points in your exchangeable interactions, and then acted like they’ve an undefinably undiminishable right, whenever they want, to access, and then with their unflattering embellishments, accessorize, your personality. Doing all this while more than casually, or blatantly, not bothering to notice they too can forget they’ll lose your graciousness when you’re emotionally healthy by not respecting your boundaries. Your spiritual stability is borne from your more than proving your private and personal miracles by your faithfully taking what’s broken and building an emotional wellbeing all of your own accord.”
What does it sound like when our friends or any of our closer than formal associates ask us, without asking us, for true spiritual provocation to carry on? Does it sound a lot like what it was when Gunner did this tonight or last night? If I did ask Gunner if he would want something like this, then I’m sure, he’d say, “Absolutely. Yes.” So I respond, “Your activation will take an astronomical amount of overlapping groundwork. And you’ll know soon that for you to go from a sincere Seabiscuit to a galactic Pegasus? It’s twelve times more work than you first imagine, and actually, about one hundred forty four thousand times more work than anyone’s ever described for you, because admitting your enamoration-worthy energies into this baroque gesture of devotion is as embarrassing as it is humbling and finally personally astonishing.”
I’d always only seen the locomotion of my iPhone’s waterfalling banners as vertical motion, the messages coming down, coming down like the struck sliver match silvering of a moonlit maelstrom’s monsoon miasma, rainfall, and not what the motion of what I’m sure I know it is now, the downstream flow, the oncoming rush of bypassing talismanic messages found along the black rapid river of the screen laid flat. I have seen the smooth face of my iPhone lay alone, lay aslant, and more often than not I’ve seen it lay very flat along whatever surface I leave it on, and it’s laid down flat, far, far, far more often than whenever I take this thing in stride, when I have it lodged inside my pocket. I’m wondering if every step I take is some sort of enforced wraparound for the smooth screen’s black social river to fall forward and fall away and fall free from, if every time I stop and stand is it another boulder or squirreling no-flow for this black social river I’ve holstered behind glass without a thought? Every image of another person’s iPhone I’ve ever seen’s always shown the screen illumined and upright, not flat and blackened. Eschewing the archetypes I’ve so far had askew, I’ve told my mind, If you’re always going to successfully grow only if and when you end up wrong? You must make art out of the flaw’s righting, that’s the entertainment. How long can the careful creator’s internal monologue carry on and flow and run over the limits of paragraph upon paragraph, until the Voice turns the work of the run-on sentence into the run-on novel? Freakishly, forever, if you force it into your cognitive recirculation. So, I’ll say, to you, my friend of this ever-next extra-sensory text, my reader, if you call yourself the writer or the artist of your life, my trustworthy friend of the page, believe in what you write if and when it is faith you find aflame and arising in your precious blood in your fingers. And don’t slip in it, don’t stumble, don’t doubt your directionlessness’ digressions either, because always they’ll still tell you something significant by showing you where you were when this was what you had to have said because you had to say this was why you were where you were standing. In a saying-maker’s maelstrom called, Your Thoughts, you must always be where your feet are when you work through what’s as of now too unreal to be entirely impossible, the gift of your desperation to describe. The way you walk through any storm is an intangibly solidified gainsay for passion. When I say that they’ll say, We see you, when you do what you know you do best? Then the words, We see you, have become, We see why you’re doing what you’re doing. Later they’ll say, We’ll see you again, because it’s become akin to, Please give us word we’ll see you on the level once on the other side of what happens today.
Now I know why line-by-line’s way too swift to work on writing word-by-word’s pitch-perfect internal pulse. I’d like to ask all y’all, How do I know how fast anyone reads what they’ve read? Or what they’ve written? Are reading speeds of the reader or the writer at any time ever matched day by day? Or are all velocities of your thoughts memorized? Instead of asking writers, Do you write with a pen or a keyboard? Why isn’t anyone asking how fast our great writers read? It’s an atrocity. Isn’t great writing one reading their writing the right way? The more and most impressive reading is to sustain a surgical, methodical, reading speed over hours upon hours, or however long, day by day, night by night, until it’s right, than finishing any novel in a single sitting.
King texts us, “Everyone’s still here. Wasted. Long-winded. No one’s leaving yet. This is their own Hurricane party. I might get drunk.”
I respond, “Let us know when or if anything changes.”
King responds, “Belligerently positive self-esteem argues that if you’re undeniably under the influence of a cocksure personality, then your undiminished confidence is what it’ll cost to craft all comfort.”
Ozzie texts us, “We’re either rabid or feral by now to know why we believe in our fiction. Belief in our fiction is far more real than all of what’s by the rest of what surrounds us considered, termed, coined, as that of the truly real on this sumptuous side of the celestial spectrum. And should you verbalize this factotum to yourself, for real, even once, you’re forced to admit you believe in the way words work in the world.”
I respond, “And then you believe in their arch alchemical power.”
I’ve been sober since Janurary nineteenth twenty twnety four. I know I don’t know what I’m doing since sobriety wasn’t a priority in my plans when I moved to Charleston’s Freemasonville. Knowing what sobriety means for myself is its own mysterious ordeal. It’s bleak and boring and I hate that I know on some level early on within sobriety you’re supposed to hate how it feels, and that that means it’s working. This is the incivility of killing pride by smothering my ego through accepting the surrender of my false invincibility. It makes me way more than goddam-fucking-angry that I think The Church of the NFL knows what I’m doing, and that The Institution also knows I’ve attempted sobriety countless times before too. Something I didn’t expect in its earliest days and nights this time, I’m without consciously working on nor nurturing what it wants, building a fast freak fondness for what I’ll find in all these rooms I inhabit by choice. Wires dangling from an unfinished light fixture remind me of a higher power in the pun. Newer notions of texture will rely on the mind for describing it all so one’s consciousness enjoys everything if it explains nothing because it works very well only if you let it have its own say. Now it’s saying to me, the usual, normal, fundamental, basic, quotidian, workaday, insignificant, is suddenly, indoors, the far-more-than-unusual, or what I might even make social emotional relations with, and now that I’m fastened onto definitive details, what they do for me in these very specific spaces, they make me care for architecture, angles, design. Sobriety’s swarthy sense of humor opens your eyes to irony’s invitations.
Mia texts me, “Streaming services destroyed story architecture so deeply, our classic story structure’s become an artificially intelligent archenemy decimated exclusively by the saga of the sharpshooting argument. Now you have to show why you’re saying what you mean.”
When you’ve decisively turned, and not by your own choice, far more wise than I still feel I am tonight, and when you’re infinitely more wise than I know I’ve been these last five years and change, it may often seem and feel that surviving in this life you devise has to come from what you write, and that in so doing this thing again and again, you’re recovering only all of what you must know about yourself until you’re thriving in the cardinal architecture of your personally august language.
Doing this work while living and lying for a living in and around downtown Freemasonville’s downtown bar district, and daily working with some of their regulars, is not easy. I know I’m doing this work like I know no one else is and so I’m sure you’ll want to know what it feels like. You won’t want to welcome the whiplash, not after too long, not at all, no way. But I work like I want you to be yet another blue crab, another blue crab that can crawl out of any bucket with me, so here it is, where I’m at in committing to doing things I thought I’d never do, only because I’m desperate to make this massive thing work for once. I promise I won’t again ever hesitate to help my writing community.
And I text Mia, “What’s inside a great line is what I should know I can show you is a good answer, when I may ask my working mind, Can I hear what sounds I see? Only then you’ll say your ears are turned on. But somehow making yourself more relatable, based on a chimeral audience reaction, what most people will tell you your writing should do, is literally the induction of your insane removal of your subjective mind from the experience of your reality in favor of accommodating the misguided misapprehensions you possess of what’s in another’s mind’s projections. Not only is this whiplash-inducing, it’s lying about what you’re lying about, and then ominously calling it, Connection. And yet fiction’s whiplash is always an interpersonal phenomenon, an individual connection to something greater than what one mind can devise. This work only works because it does the work the world does not. This work is always excruciating. It’s harder than you know to deal with the pain of perfecting your fiction because you know you brought it upon yourself.”
Mia responds, “What if my best and cleverest idea of fiction is making up what fiction is so I don’t have to deal with every wrong version of its flawed former self that’s now come before this raw time I have on my red hands? Isn’t this the more real reflex on my pages?”
I respond, “Ambling around downtown Freemasonville, I can’t help but now compulsively meditate on my imagination.”
Mia says, “In fiction, a line is nothing unless you somehow show me all of what it means when you say something.”
I say, “I’m here to hunt down what I know I need to notice. These are the not insignificant differences in my slow’d to smelting and surreal seven invisible neon signs. Maybe they’re not exactly seven levels of hell to suffer? And maybe my suffering comes when any shallow and shoddy descriptions of my gifts, descriptions from souls not performing but preening their miscomprehension of my gifts, and my hard work, get to go unchecked while and when they misunderstand what’s made to make and mean about what meaning I’ve made, it’s insult when any unseen, They, makes what I’ve made mean somewhat less than what flex-fashionable fundamental truth I know I’ve manufactured for their minds. I know everything in Freemasonville’s downtown bars is coming alive again, and bouncing along, and buzzing, and near-to booming, and basically going along swimmingly. But it does not mean we’re back to normal with each other, because that could never happen again, not after what I’ve done storming through their walls for these five years.”
Mia says, “I’m still thinking about what you said about what I should have thought about what Grace Knox wanted me to think. Why I should more often think about what people want me to think. For me? Grace Knox adores approval from people more impossible to impress.”
What’s possibly craziest about my sense of my recovery program is how little I know about its entirety. This while knowing how well I know I won’t, can’t, shouldn’t draw up any long range outline of its subjective success, and exactly how little my recovering community will tell me all that matters, when I’m actually doing what they call, the work. IYKYK.
One season ago in a group message with Gunner, Ozzie and King I’m sure some one of them forwarded to Mia, I drunkenly decreed that since they were the stylish artists of their own lifestyles? A very similar aptitude should apply to their writing styles, all y’all should be your own wondrously wise writing gods. I said, I believe most writers eventually find it not so hard to fathom why most all writing and most all writers are criminally mistaken, by people whom might even become part and parcel of their audience as devilish, for their writing is acting as a false idol or godheaded impersonation, because everything at the true root of any writer’s truth is too good at vivifying the drive to inspire what gives anyone reading you some better chance at being captivatingly charmed by the breviloquence of the black lightning strike we call a sentence, even though this is often our only chance to claim for some time in our daily nights an unequaled unequivocal alacritous beauty.
I followed up with, Maybe what I meant to say was, A sentence can only go so far to establish its notions when the eyes give it all its own motion. Have all y’all noticed how fear feels false in great writing? I’m not knocking nor invoking the horror genre. I’m saying, Any writing or writer exhibiting some fear of a reader’s reaction should invalidate whatever higher human good your emotional depth and grace can elicit. Fear loves to look like a labyrinth and it wants most to turn your thoughts around and send them back where they came from, because fear doesn’t look where it is going, fear is blind. Fear blinds us by forcing our entire system of thinking into primordial mechanical fight or flight. Any writing too obviously only ever preparing its presentation of a socially acceptable surface of personality that’ll allow for its survival? Is fear, ironically unleashed by the tether of one’s many social mediums. Is not free. Is pointlessness. Is personified by the false fear of what happens if one doesn’t exercise someone else’s notion of appropriated restraint. Your writing is far better if leaving your accessibilities hidden elsewhere. Still, I can recognize how since all this is being said in a group text, it is in some sense eliciting suspicions I could’ve said this to your face if I meant what I was saying, and that in this textual form, it might represent a more than fearsome emotional signal I can also imagine too incisively then saying, to all y’all, I think how writers are treated, if what in their writing is unimaginably more true, when you at last show all of you to your paginated world at large, is, as though in person their mind at work for humankind is no good. That they’re tantamount to complete taboo. Writers are relentlessly accused of treason against their societies on the grubby grounds of their insistent profitlessness, should they favor their touch, shaping the light and shadow and mask of their propheticism.
Lately, I care more that I follow through on what I’ve started, but because I have to watch countless lit lives enflicker as I walk these built-for-boozing blocks, I’ll notice how I at once tend to only want what’s inside these many, many bars so much more when I know I can’t do anything apart from ask my mind, Are you aware you’re always alliterating your allusions to your alienation? Or, What if when you entirely commit to this wicked thing you learn all outside influence beyond your more true than true audience’ll say that since you do not listen to how you’re supposed to view yourself anymore, and I must remain at the wonderful edge and far enough away from what’s going on outside where my mind wishes I would wander, then you’ve more often than not proven you’ve become a social werewolf? And, Have you grown into what you are because what you are is only you if you show the entire self doggedly perfecting each individual lexicographical inevitability? Or, What if our wish fulfillments’ll merely alter what we wind up wishing for out of our lives?
King’s plan to perfect layer upon layer of lies, this entirely special reconnaissance, makes us feel it’s like we’re coming more alive in our darkest revelations. King’s imagination at work means we can play like we’re onto something big. The social weather wasn’t very warm earlier and it’s even cooler this evening, and this only makes more doors come open at night. Inside one large door’s opening out onto a dark and long entry foyer’s hallway comes a vibrant voice from in the heart of one hole in the wall dive bar I know I’ve never visited sober. He’s loud and he’s hotheaded and he’s taking the impossible position. He’s arguing for some sort of Southern miracle. He’s my kind of person. He sounds like a walking-talking ascendant astral jabberwocky progressively downloading drunk zodiac incarnations, or at least like a man killing off any and all of his remaining fears that this type of topic isn’t his area of better bantering expertise. Nearly passing over the rest of what he’ll soon be saying so I might carry on with my other observation duties, I’m struck by something new in his line of logic and it holds me at the threshold. I hang on and I linger and I listen through the purely overstood not understood jest of an overshooting soothsayer’s overcooked hot take hyperbole. Why, just before I finally stopped giving him the benefit of the doubt so I might resume what I was doing, did I give in to the temptation to stand, stay still, slow down so I could clearly overhear enough of what I could hear him passionately slur to his good friend? Because once clarified, I know it’s another kind of Ozzie, telling a another kind of Gunner, “The universal game is not soccer anymore. It’s football. College football. College football can happen anywhere in America. America invented the concept of the sports universe. See, the universe? It’s like a temper tantrum. Think. Boom. Chaos. Universe. There it is. Hits you right in the face. Universal. College football. University football. It’s the universe of a city. See? Right? Universe-city or college football should be the world’s universal sport. American football’s empire should show you it’s much more compelling than all other sports. Your team is your reflection of your way of life. Empire. It’s a world wide domination in waiting. It’s winning on the body field. Add it up, college football game attendance is on average bigger than every professional soccer game the world over. It’s right in the word. Universe-city. And think of the bodies. Celestial bodies have to slam together to make planets. We know about our universe only because planetesimals first slammed into earth. The entire black and blue earth is a body field. What is more universal than some sort of or some kind of bigger than life bodies slamming into each other?”
This unbelievably too-confident man has my heart. My mind is slow’d and I feel his joy and I’m smitten and I’m inspired and I’m now more sure I was very right from the first to believe without knowing why I’ve always loved all minds toting any totally impossible perspective, why I love our more rare, more difficult people, because I’ve also been one of those wonderfully impossible people with an unflinching belief in making the impossible course of action turn into a true possibility.
Ask, Is this what has to happen, the true Prince of Darkness must make himself an ascended master all of his own accord? Ask, If this is all a trustworthy mind of man-manufactured light work, proven positive, does he who is Him deign to play with what’s made more of what makes our animated mankind, mankind? Ask, Is this Spirit? Ask, Is Story our Spirit? Ask, Is this why humanity stirs to storytell? Ask, Then, so, should I implore all y’all to believe, Story is what humanity stands up for when Story stands in for all of the hollow theatricality of false empathy if we ever make the terrible mistake of letting others tell us about ourselves? Ask, Is this the galactic dance? Ask, Is this the way we’ve been set in between the heaven and hell of lying to ourselves about ourselves? Ask, Are we at our best by watching us work in our lives to acrobatically step deeper through what we believe are our true stories for the freely willed choice to catapult farther into our life’s language telling itself about why telling itself exactly what it is for is never impossible, and therefore what makes our language more than what it would be were it any way other way? And summarily, that our Story and Spirit are both light and dark? If I understand what Satan means to mankind, does Lucifer fight against Satan’s costume? Is it the voice within this story carrying on or the man himself when we hear another kind of Ozzie ask another Gunner, “Why were the two hottest anticipated literary releases the last time I went to a bookstore a set of unedited diaries and a man’s more manic letters? Do you even know why I would want to care what Kafka and Gaddis said to the people they cared about when they didn’t care so much about what they had to look like when their works weren’t proof-read nor perfectly polished by editors for the wider reading public?”
I let him trail off as I walk onwards. These young guns from our kind of writer’s room sound not all that much unlike when I play Slugg. And to me for us to be part of his and this iconic idealogical coaching language tree; this barbaric but beautiful boon of better blotto word works? It hits me right between the eyes, that while it remains much far too dark to see precisely where all this is coming from, I can enjoy imagining some one of my perhaps more compassionate though begrudgingly beloving friends will say to another Ozzie in another Gunner’s voice, with the graveled rabble of a saintly blackout drunk’s clarified insight in forming the special counterargument method of what makes a Dostoyevsky midnight scene sizzle, because it mostly sounds like something Gunner would say to contract the utilitarian contrast for Ozzie’s hilariously out-of-pocket position, “Wow. Man. First of all? C’mon, no one calls it, University Football. You can’t use the wrong name for the sport you’re arguing for, and then in good faith say it matters more than another sport. Second, no one but Americans have the money for American football equipment. Do you know how much it costs to suit up fifty three men for an NFL team? What about one hundred plus for a college football team? College football always needs something like the NFL to survive, to get people to invest. So, third, do you remember the NFL Europe? I sure do. Football is American. And the football in football, the world’s football, is shaped like the world. The beautiful game is much better than football as the world’s game.”
I’ve got to walk away from what I want to say to them, so I ramble on. And then I intone into my iPhone’s voice memo application’s deftly tracking fluorescent sound waves atop my reddening palm, The most simple thing one can say about baseball’s absence is, I miss it. And in most of our smoking and talking sessions, I primarily think about what’s going on in my cancelled privacy. Do I miss that? Would I miss this more? Not one of us up there much wonders why we, anymore, won’t just once and finally take out our old temptations to place them before the pyretic point of the blowtorch so we might sooner get back to our work. Are we sportswriters and sports fans and playground quarterbacks and poets and novelists dumber than we look? Hell no, of course not, no way, no, we’re only seriously all far too tender from the last time we loved everything about what we loved enough to take in the imperfect affection from our alluring positions on our preferred mindful poisons. Your memory can call it whatever it wants when your memory isn’t predictable. But I can’t tell you if your memory’ll still kiss your mind with the words you wanted for what you wanted and’ve worked with. I’m more sure today our novel’s imagination’s ammunition is always what we know we’ve wanted to wrangle in our lives since we announced our first forevermore’s potential, when we were writing not for writerly prestige, but writing’s love, when we were most romantically young and redeemably wrong. Let me ask you though, What have you sworn off since the last time we spoke? You might ask me, Who’s fault has this always been? If you’re the novelist bringing your loved ones into the rapid raw black universal river flow of any fiction’s self-produced but self-productive underworld? Then send what you cannot part with away from its karma forever. You should’ve said I shouldn’t text you anymore. I know you can hear me talking from the other side. On my end, in my mind, your emotional essence doesn’t ever stop speaking. I know these essential feelings, they sweep my ears with sensual emotional signatures. Emotional signatures comprised of such a unique second nature. I’m way out here, where, again, tonight, I can always find my way back through everything I think you’re thinking about my not being there with you because one way or another, I’m looking for seven more black glass window replacements. My pilfered neon play-making has left a vacuum. You can see exactly what I mean when I say I need just some sort of sure signal I’m exactly where, over the longest year of my life, you could have said, I left behind all seven invisible neon signs. But I’m feeling swiftly overwhelmed by the indulgent aromatic wealth of many innumerable wood smoke plumes.
I can feel someone watching me, so I stop speaking, and I take one step, then I stand still, before I go on, and I say, I’m surrounded not by crowds but countless convivial spiritual infernos I cannot completely more or less see and source nor suss out. Yet these simply romanticized signs and symptoms crop up everywhere, they exist in everyone. And if it is yet another desired expression I’m coherently generalizing for my current understanding of the refined fundamental spirit of my new growth on these first true instinctive grounds? Then I should assign my self some instruction, stop pretending I’ve any universal comprehension of the entire human emotional possibility, and say that, simply I know what I know because on some level I know I’ve close to unfettered and unlimited access within all of what extremes I want from the absolutely guaranteed infinite experiential expansion of my energy; like I’m even somewhat-  “Hey, Merlin!” What in the world? Then I whirl and I’m dizzied, and it’s like my mind jumps back seven years before this nearby soprano playfully unlooses another singsonging legato, “Merlin!” at me again. Where? Stabbing through my gobsmacked body, my pulse sharpening, and I’m stuck stock still mid-stride, mid-thought, mid-word. And I want to come unstuck so I can finish locating the source of what someone knows about my older era of constant transitions between freakish realities of impossibly insatiable inset hunger for otherworldly diction, before this recent shouted sound, my middle name’s double knelling, brings more life than bewilderment back into my eyes. Ask yourself, Is my gaze a gandering or the growth of something greater the more I put into what it can do in the world I’ve built on this page?
There. I have my eyes halt then hang onto something very new to me, less than two dozen strides away from my hammering heart beats, it’s an extremely famous platinumchromium grill grinning underneath an even more glamorously prestigious angelic emblem. And the dense wave of one very thick car door’s stolid thump passes through my cheek bones and shoulder blades and ribcage and kneecaps and ankles. Out in the night’s violaceous plain sight, I’ve become something I’ve forgotten entirely so I might savor the awe of what kinetic possibility I can predict for all y’all I’d encounter behind the wheel of this automobile. And have all y’all ever wondered what’s really beyond what’s being said by our commonly repeating the old tale of how and why Hunter S. Thompson said he taught himself to write well by typing and then typing out over and over and over and again, The Great Gatsby? Every correctly constructed sentence one allows to slide aslant one’s eyes will always slingshot one’s imagination throughout one and then yet another recursive upon ever-recurring and spiritually rerouting graceful and symbolic set of what are none other than alchemized hand mudras, or human-electrical circuits, until eventually a masterful mellifluous feeling’s mapped out on one’s mind so you may at your own pleasurable behest truly behold one particular novelization’s life’s symphonic symptoms. So say to yourself for your salvation, I’m entertaining ever deeper desires for signifying what stands in for hand-eye coordination’s exciting replacements. It is in these words in practice we provide our greatest chance at consistently opening our second city gateways. Beware if within this vibration, you believe you’re growing more and more fly by the flash millisecond, because as my eyes slowly adjust to what must’ve begun this newest itch in my reddening hands I now wonder why I’ve since long before tonight known how one day I would see all I’ve wanted come to life here, where, sunk low in one long lone car stall, there resides divine interference’s elimination because the clear inference of this anomolous infrequency perched on the nearest Pennsylvania blue curbstone? This beautiful thing, what idles here in my hands if all y’all trust what’s in my eyes, is far more money than I’ve ever made from writing, twelve times over and them some, and she’s so totally dark blue she’s nearly black, it’s a smug yet head-turning exotic grand touring vehicle, and it’s like the mother’s tongue of a luxurious modern horsepower’s refinement’s growling anew, and these teeth rattling tones have replaced what I thought I knew of the elegant mother tongue with what I work with amidst the torque of a tantalizing threat of a good time, it is the temptation to say I now own the tricky temptations I suffer within these sleek, curvaceous, velocity-portentions; it’s life presenting me with a properly erotic, purring, resplendent twenty twenty four pearlescent aura’d vision of an Aston Martin V12 Vantage, an automotive perfection made especially for this time and place and spangled with head rests of cloud white leather seats stitched together by flashy Columbia University sky blue threads, balanced on four so-completely-bright-they’re-crystal steel rims, saying, “Watch your step and open your eyes. If you are what you say you are? Then there’s always round every bend of one’s supermassive pride some one thing more fly than what you are to balance you out.” As above, so below, as in my mind, what befalls my eyes, and I begin another voice memo so I can tell my total story later, “This one’s got a Vee-Twelve. An awesome oasic thing made by this motoring mirage. It’s your drive. When you see it in person you think you’re never going to be able to get one for yourself unless you’re reincarnated. But your drive must be what you can describe for yourself. Someone’d just shouted, ‘Merlin,’ at me out here, although now I think I heard what I wanted said at me. At least the chance I’ve misunderstood led me to see this thing tonight. Do you remember, Exotic Dogfighters? Amazing thing, that, I thought of it as an English invention done out-of-this-world-excellent. But by talking to you, I’d walked right by this gem, like its story wasn’t what I’d wanted since before you and I met. That’s what I think you and I and everyone always does with whatever’s considered over our head. It shouldn’t be but I think we’ll look up to it until it’s best if left ignored.”
The Vantage’s door locks clunk shut with a splashless chockfull, “Hmmph.” Her driver side window opens, and from in behind the great and grand glow of her gallant headlights a broadening scheme of far-reaching-ever-branching silent implications refract. I try to learn by speaking up, but I beller, “Where are you going Grace?!” before the car aquaplanes as pressure balloons behind my forehead while the engine yowls and the exhaust pipes snarl and the serpentine’d loop’d timing of a Southern Baroness’s liquid crackling laughter comes alive from inside the frame. It’s a skilled Southern drawl rolling through the sensurround and wood smoke as smooth as the dense leather abyss surrounding this ensoured soprano shouting, “You don’t know who you’re talking to!”
How is it that as she’s leaving I first wonder if and how I didn’t know she’d been Freemasonville’s muse the entire time? The Vantage sprints into the middle distance before the tiny taillights are diminished -  two little ruby spritzes acurl leftward and vanishing. How’d we not foresee King Charlemagne pretending he’d not known that tonight he knew he was writing through Ozzie, Gunner, Mia, Grace and I to concoct a very long short story featuring the unforeseen return of his infamous-among-all-of-us-in-Freemasonville-for-almost-always-being-missing-from-his-life drinking? Or did we know what he was doing all along without wanting this fact acknowledged? This must be why King pushed us all so hard this week to get us to pay attention to his story first. The persuasive panache? Yes. And I catch myself nodding more than once at the shape I shoulder within the liquid and mirror’d tinted window on a gray stone building behind me. I notice why I’ve found I think it is a warped quicksilver enframing of my own mythology, my story. Here I may make out in a darker reflection my locomoting body as a shockingly surreal and extra large but minikin Bigfoot now come to clarified life in the void between where I am and what is the flashing back of a Subaru, five spangled ice-white color concentrations on one, my upthrust open hand across the space next to, two, my mug, beside three, my glowing iPhone just off my left ear, and the low-lying stacked, staggered four-five, double half solarium shells of my white and red Air Jordan twelves. Sidestepping self-inflicted delusional damage, I bend my body round the stolid stone wall as I pass into part of a tunnel I notice has the roof ripped off of it and this long dark alleyway’s brutalist yet parabolic jaws shoot up to scoot in behind my black fleece jacket. And I conclude what I’d been recording so I can begin recording again. I touch the red bullseye and I speak into the new blue waves, saying, “Haven’t had to have a fleece coat on since early May twenty eighteen. It was the night James Paxton threw a no-hitter for the Seattle Mariners. The way you talk about a no-hitter is by talking about it without ever talking about it. So if I honor every one of the elements of the letters my eyes’ll elect for my lines simply because I feel I know their soul songs? Then they’re electric. What eccentricity is it if I’m still talking to you like you’re still here with me? Are you the only ghost I can depend on anymore? I’m getting cold at random at night again. So. You around?”
One cannot skip such important steps or one’ll before one knows where one’s walking like I am now notice too late I’ve kicked through some smaller devolved jungle’d soul’s residence, aware it’s just like how I’ve given up drinking, wherein the whole mess I’ve completely wrecked what was once a wet, worn, tarnished, yet very warm place of dark rest, there goes the front door, the lid, the barrier, absolutely annihilated. My treads strafe and trample the back side of the overturned cardboard box. A whiteblack clustered monkey knot of literal alley-cats go ascatter. Several dart back down the way I came and go out beyond the edge of the stone wall I’d leaned on while I’d got caught looking at the Vantage. I say, “I don’t know why instantly I know I’ll never see them the way they were again. They were just that fast. Cats are guardians and guides of the underworld in North American mythology. Tell me if I’m onto something here, later, better than never, are jungle cats what I’ve meant, when I say I know all I’ve known of my Exotic Dogfighters? This is the self-lionizing memory of my intersection of illumination where my fictions make fiction. This is the quixotic kind of thing I’ve had happen too much since the dog days of my first nocturnal summer.” Seven cats remain near the sodden wreckage, frozen, staring. Tensed, I twitch, the leftover cats bolt and streak and scram. I say, “Hot-blooded chiaroscuro of fangs and eyes and claws, a shadow-ink dalliance amidst the fresh alternating moon glows and black pools of azure street light.”
Mia texts me, “Where were you for the Autumnal Equinox?”
I respond, “Why?”
Mia says, “You knew you had a coequal nightfall and sunshine of twelve hours to work with when you first arose with the morning star?”
I respond, “You reek of fortitude.”
Mia says, “Why not ask where I’d hunkered for your hurrication?”
I respond, “Now everything’s a significant shade more interesting.”
Mia says, “Do you know what time of year it is in your mind?”
Salubriously cryptic correspondence always calls within itself for celebrating our every shred of momentum’s next fascinating moment. Though I’ve done more than a few although not too many self-vivifying things vastly different than what all I was doing this time last year. And I may now in my self-image look like a beast, like I’m fresh off some remorselessly giant summery growth spurt. I still want to argue to myself I’ve never openly thieved any real neon from anyone that cared for me, and therefore I’ll just say to my story in another voice memo I’ll begin, because I know everyone has these things written down in their pocket, “I’ve in this last month correctly identified, for all and sundry, Seven Invisible Neon Signs, where you must make your own replacement for the light that’s gone for good. However morally bankrupt you want to argue that that is, it’s completely coined my vice, if and when I steal your shine, when what I’m doing is working for all y’all and working very well for me. I know you know you’ll still feel euphorically drunk. Don’t call me a bartender. I’m no mermaidian barman. This is only a literary ocean’s opening. Notwithstanding larceny, damaged premises, slops, splashes, flus, every conceivable kind of common cold, way too long extra long weekends so fiscally enriching all of the above are worth one’s ignorance and disregard, on this autumnal night, we’re out here digging into these psychic troves and stockpiles and treasure chests and coming for their secrets because it’s the disrespect, gentleman. If all y’all learn when to disrespect what fanatic false warnings and fears one’s had programmed into one’s body, in the pocket, all y’all could cash in big. Out at the end of the tunnel, I’ll find Gunner; or at least some kind of Gunner King has let me find. He’ll say, ‘Hold on, what’d’yah tell me?’”
Then I say, “In my unlimited drunk confidence this time last year I did everything I could in order to rudely push back and push in every goddam too puffed out chest then ruffle every single too undeservedly smugly smutty prideful feather until I felt I could know my words would do what I wanted in all of our minds when I went away with them. Only sober, I know, I wanted the words to cut up your confidence the right way. I don’t know how much of what I’ve said I’ve actually captured. Seems I scribble down almost damnnear everything I’ve extemporized.”
Gunner says, “Tell me this, why does the personal angle of the polish upon the better author’s applied charms bewitch the recipient so deeply that they abstain from thoughts of mounting a counter attack?”
I say, “Because if it’s correct and the writer’s writer writes what’s write for the right writer? Then incurvating solutions thread through what’s thereafter, silence. Has anyone ever overheard eyebrows luffing?”
We walk up the block toward our rendezvous spot. Ozzie’s lurking outside The Mermaid’s front door. He’s pretty well pretending to be or is actually stumbling-stone-blind-drunk while recircling a crescent route and repetitively doubling back on his footfall’s arches. One extremely exaggerated elliptical foot swing inflects upon bypassing life outside his orbit and freely signals a new panic in one of the recently evicted urban felines. But Ozzie remains far too distracted by what he wishes we were all doing inside The Mermaid. He repetitively lifts his chin and looks inside the dim and dark frosted glass window like he wants for his eyes to alight onto no more than an impossibly clear sight line of the evening elite’s proceedings so he can understand what he can’t imagine about what’s being said at the central source of this power source’s chatter. Then I know, Ozzie wants nothing more than to be King Charlemagne. Ozzie writes in our group text, “When you’re back out here, King. Talk like you only have enough ink like blood in your body to briefly write down what their naked faces showed you when everyone trusted you to know what they meant about what they said.” Ozzie looks up at us, disgusted by our exile outside this exit. Ozzie says, “The enforced cheerfulness of bright colors from the heights of theses fructified street names come to life. No way we’re getting into the Hurricane party planning session for tomorrow night’s and this forthcoming weekend’s Hurricane parties. We’re locked out so we may only deftly imagine what happens in the deltas between action and thought, produce our comments, and pray they come across like we’re on the live wires of their psychic streaming frequencies. Then if we’re all about connection? We’re approximating the best telepathy of a Southeastern conference call. Let’s walk back to the silver muscle car, we can sit soft in silence.”
Anyone authentically in love with their letters will never ignore their epically better epistolary bent for longer than a few hours. It can’t and it won’t shut down because it won’t let itself go on ignored for long. It beckons, it calls out, it thrashes. One hundred tight-kernel-keyboard-crackling minutes later, with no trace of any advancing social-welcome neon sign that King’ll follow through on what he said he’d do for us this evening, so we could, without saying we were going to, all set up various Hurrication weekend events and compile far-ranging rosters of upper-echelon elite Hurricationing cronies to ride coattails on to do so, even after King’s aligning with our class in snootified gracelessness-actuarial diatribes we’ve still the chance to review in our group text, suggesting he meant what he said when he said he wanted us witnessing his purview’s witlessnesses, we’ve each of us in the silver muscle car the sick sense King is ignoring Ozzie’s subtle admonishment for the rest of night, and is using what he knew was coming on from Ozzie as excuse for ignoring us for the rest of the night. Ozzie says, “King must have gotten more than hammered. I wonder if Grace or Mia’s inside relapsing too? Maybe he invited them instead of us, while we were stuck outside. That’d make more sense than saying he’s ditched us not for the enemy but a corrupted side of the powerful.” Gunner says he’s glad he’s finished working not on what he said he would do when this night began, but finished working for far less than he’s ever been paid for writing on a deadline, and he says he’s turned in a short piece to his higher power, detailing all of King’s recent social criticisms. He says, “Who has said what is in my words what seems like what matters less than my elaborately verifying through attributing all of our observations of these flaws unto the fake quotes of grossly mischaracterized people everyone knows of and knows they know the names for despite my now inventing new ones.” And Gunner says he knows The Intistution’s secret power players will blackmail King’s social editors with anecdotal evidence of extensive favor and bribe-acceptance until King admits he relapsed, and this he says’ll mean they’ll in the end have to have his head for the white flag of surrender. He says, “It’s nothing but flat-out fiction finally starting a war against the misuse of a fact-check coming to light without emotional momentum’s context. Let’s have them fact-check my piece so I can quit the wrong side of the letter spectrum by sending the right kind of message. We were watching what was happening in The Mermaid’s red basement for what? For who? Who cares what we care about? This was what became King’s solo call to show us all exactly where we couldn’t touch his clout. It’s my own lesson in doing what I’ve wanted to since I began working on this several years ago, to see exactly what I can get away with in print. Now I know the line better. I feel I’m after a lot of the maniacal magic in my bloodstream. I remember what you were like when you got here, how your lion’s mane was way more cocky, frilled, completely cockatoo. Everything is different and bigger. And I know you’ve not disclosed it to us at all? But I feel I can know maybe you know we know how you only ever predicted by penning the presence of your fake yet zealous Church of the NFL until you knew we knew for you it was all and always more than real. What could be said about what you wrote says that you wrote for a multimillions-deep national body of consciousness, a jabberwocky juggernaught, every line the flight of the Olympiad’s mythically flawless javelin until your digital editor approved your stance on a new canon of what you’ve known without knowing can and does only but one major thing, confirm the constant reality of this cult-ural verve’s national pull. If every professional team’s city is a nation-state, they should have an international faith they can all ascribe to and honor and respect. My piece was full of two hundred word single-sentence paragraphs. Will they read it? Will they want me to redo it? Would they ever ask me to redo it? They’ll kick me in the teeth. I’ll go get that platinum grill. ‘You must now aim, without aiming; drive slow, slower, cruise.’ The trick is getting into ghosting reality in real time. Ghosting. Ghosted. Ghost.”
I turn around from the shotgun seat and shake Gunner’s hand.
At the wheel, Ozzie says, “To do anything dependably well from within the long gone deep end of your abyss, you must focus on no more desire than to perfect the personal aspiration of high discipline. You’re working against whatever works against your passages pursuing resistancelessness. All writers must combat the constantly traumatic sorrow of social media-induced anxiety. And daily they have to wage war again and again against what words their overlords have deemed attention-grabbing. There is never one single day where the twenty first century writer is not sick to their stomach they have to accept they don’t know how to crack the social media algorithm of their ideal intended audience. Otherwise they’d have all the sway in the world to work with. Harder to accept is you don’t really know what you’re doing. Gunner’s said the successful completion of one surmounting hazardous obstacles must call upon complicated intuitions and naked ambition. Obstacles’ll now say, Don’t go to them. Let them come to you. Why? Who do I have looking over my shoulder? is not the same thing as asking, Who has my back? Will you trust your memory remains unpilfered by shoddy storage perception even when you’re immersed in every moment you abandon its usefulness for what’s here and now? Who told you that you should try holding nothing back from the present? Was this what you foresaw you wanted to have said? How’re you supposed to shape your stylish writing in an idyllic disguise if profound insights come only from your great loss of self or sanity? ‘Why would you say that?’ may be what you want to hear because then at least someone kills off all oversaturated silencing.”
I reach over and I squeeze Ozzie’s spine at the base of the nape. Everyone begins rocking a rabid fleer. Ozzie starts the silver muscle car and we drive slow, slower, cruise. From the back seat the blunt bangers on blast roll right and we burn and we bang through the Black Album, Reasonable Doubt. King’s Hurrication rolls through Freemasonville. Hunkered in my office, my power’s gone for good just around ninety nine day-long minutes after the first furloughs of the full strength storm bushwhacks my wide wall of windows. And then the entire afternoon feels like the bleak end of my life’s longest later morning while I work on what I know I’ll need to again rewrite because I’ll have to walk the empty hallways once my MacBook battery’s toast. Soon I assume the power’ll come back when I accept myself completely, and when I can finally stand myself, and my mind, when I can hear the whispers of my submerged lunar thoughts almost too well. Some of the people you know also know you know they cannot stand how freakishly proud they are that you come into success from your protesting everything they stand for. When I say you must listen to your ancient ancestors more than your present blood relatives, I’m saying this enaction says you’ve given yourself some sort of sense for some incapacitation-relieving imaginary patience you trust that they’ve only ever wanted your valorous creative warriorship of your own version of an effusive center stage, so you’re delivered from yourself at the right time exactly, and please don’t be alarmed if your best work argues that your literary universe-city has to receive far, far more text than any reader thought they knew they could imbibe in one sitting. This is a good thing. Have them stand still until the storm stops. They’ve also been running away from their generational curses since before you were born. It’s not your fault today, they and you know that through what you’ve learned overnight? The only successful growth of the author and artist comes from turning one’s back on the unnecessary black energy of social validation if this distance distills a revealing of what becomes of a better black heart brought into the light of your undivided attention. Are you styling your insights? Or is it me? Are you listening close when the storm is crashing into your house? Where do you live if this happens in your mind? Do you say, You didn’t know the rain could sound like that? I wonder if you bet that’s because that or this is the only way you think the torrential downpour’s wanted to speak with all y’all. And although these streaky sterling orblets detail the disambiguous darkness of my storm-stained glass, I know the night sky is not my only cathedral. I can day-walk again if I don’t allow these antagonistic winds to seal shut the working eternal materialization I’ve made in my eyes. If fiction can find marathon-long form sarcasm hyperbolic enough? It can become deadly serious, eventually, more than meaningful, because your great sense of humor has survived the all too interminably false structure of thoughts of security. Eternal truths show nothing is certain and nothing is forever. The novelist needs to know they are not neutral when they work with their words. They are best if devoid of normalizing why they hunt for the documentable facts of their entire subjective emotional universe.
Downtown, I’ve embraced my lurid hurricane’s wrath from the end of our sublime South Caroline Super Bowl season until I forget all about everything esle. The worst Hurricane damage is down the road from our city, in King’s isolated South Carolina, where the surviving trees are pissed off their kind were chopped down for subdivisions, strip malls, bullshit suburbia, generic building blocks. And you can feel their fury because it’s buried in their suffering roots too. All this information I’ve learned from the South’s oldest daily newspaper, the Post and Courier of Charleston South Carolina, which celebrated a two hundred and twenty first hyperlocal hyperbolically sobering birthday on January tenth twenty twenty four. Charleston Charlemagne is in a rich pink button-up and navy blue blazer in my office at first light. He’s carrying on in a modestly downtempo and solemn mood to account for whatever I may feel in his presence. He does not sound overtly too stern when he says, “First of all I feel obliged to ask if you enjoyed what I can assume was your very first hunkered down Hurrication, though perhaps I won’t because I know you didn’t, to get the full story might reasonably take months. And we’ve more pressing matters to attend to at this time. Your sessions have become from what I’ve gleaned through context clues and my deep textual analysis in the oasic-for-our-more-than-hyper-literary-minds on your pages, a comprehensively proper preparation for The Institution’s officially encouraging you to continue this deepening of this exact same course of action, with all of your personal adjustments guiding our local laws. You understand. This is excellent. We’ll need to finalize your pitch for the next set-ups and preparations of your personal progress beyond your pages by the next first of the month to take this to the next level by the end of this academic year. Do you need anything from me to make this happen? Would you like any alterations? Can I adjust any of your present arrangements to enhance this continuance?”
What I don’t say is, “After yesterday I knew what I had to do today. Today, going hard, I’ve had a monster morning. That doesn’t mean any of this isn’t difficult. I’ll acknowledge exactly how I feel at every stage of the journey, so if you’ll please allow me to forget fakery?” I’ll instead say all of what I want to say without clearly saying so much, in an effort to get away with saying what I’ve wanted to say all along, “Freemasonville desperately needs a potent poetic college football team spirit to survive.”
Charleston Charlemagne does not say, “Quixotic.”
Charleston Charlemagne says, “Why a college football spirit?”
I don’t say, “You’ve at once seen your future and thought you’ve asked for a friend, when in fact you’ve asked for your wildly overdue personal evisceration. My biggest and worst distraction is pretending I’m probably not who I really am while muddling in frail service to a lesser mankind hellbent on being bigger than they ever stand in their shoes.” So I can say, “It’s our hard work’s perfect counterbalancing equivalent.”
Charleston Charlemagne says, “Consider it near completion.”
I rise and we stand close together and we shake hands. Walking toward the hallway, he momentarily stops in the doorway. Into the still dark space down the hall, he says, “Don’t tell them this is what you’re doing yet, but insinuate, impose, instill.” The resonating syllables abuzz, he carries on without turning around, as if his action is asking, “Why do we need a physical language from another physical location’s soul in order to understand what makes ours more than mysterious?” Down from the end of the hallway, a sonorous rumble caroms back, “If he could actually remember what he told me over the phone last night, inebriated, he’d be five times the novelist he is this morning.” It’s like he’s telling me that earlier this month I don’t remember that I’ve correctly assumed with no sure facts nor true knowledge worthy of today’s standard verification practices that Charleston’s second city is in fact one of the last operating metropolitan hubs of ancient Tartaria. And then he says, “The other night he said you said, Everything you do is an excellent expression of what he’s sure equates his worth with what one writes down.’ Makes your personal marks mean more than a note to self.” As in, Charleston Charlemagn is saying, “This is bigger than you.” To which implication I’d rather not comment upon, but let burn slow.
Based on my reading of this situation, this novel, this flight style aforementioned by what I remember I’d predicted as my future, the Church of the NFL’s built a certifiably grand canon of a league for competitive creators finalizing the Great American Novel’s best wild wordplay. Charleston Charlemagne does not need to ask, Who would want to make music with a deaf man? Because my writing’s brought us both here where now the vibration of seven invisible neon chapters has taken these seven invisible neon signs apart better than I could’ve ever otherwise chopped and screwed and slow’d my mind for my mind so well I’m sure every neon sign I ever see will never really know whether or not I’m also entirely abuzz, to show them to them, because they can’t hear anything other than what they’re showing me. As an animal of my thoughts, I reward my soul-felt beliefs with shadowy reinforcements when I’m defending the decadence of my personality’s empurpled kingdom. I’ll ask you do not speak if your writing does not lobotomize the insufferable who’ve found boredom and their souls inseparable. We await all kinds of whosoever’s been exposed to the black heart of the one way you write down the work of your novel, unraveling the way you live, so IYKYK you’re only finished when your first assumptions are undone. How it all starts like all y’all found Jesus is how it sounds when it ends. Or is this the end of, simply, fear? This might have to be what I call the end of it all. The end of all of what, exactly? Fear. End of the endless criticism of the true reality of my fiction, the end of accusations of false hope and false love I could not stop receiving from these vibrations. Fake love finished forever and sent over the edge to plunge under the water of my unrelenting black river thought stream - when it thrashes.
Are we there yet? Where? The point where I’ve showed you it’s possible anybody would do anything to anyone to’ve achieved the high mindedness required to’ve finally finished all the work required for their goals? Look out behind you? What’s there now? Infiniti G35 coupe. In enriched quicksilver. And so lowered it is almost inset its own baby blue underglow. What do you think? What are you actually looking at? A too unique luxury sports car both sneaky swift and buttoned up so well it’s practically dapper, it’s almost more work to see what it is when it’s at work, because it doesn’t look entirely like what it is, until one witness sees exactly what happens when speed outperforms fear. What does that one look back at? A sleek second-hand Porsche Cayenne. Hoarsethroaty and howling twin exhaust pipes crackle and cool. Paint ruby red so lush it looks like rouge. If I stand outside this moment then act like I can stand still, my face cuts back through its liquified window reflections. As both fomrs begin turning in the sun, the pink metallic sheen all but convinces me it always looks much better in motion than whenever it is reluctantly parked, silenced, curbed, composed, because it’s not doing nothing. I want nothing more than a chance at turning on every mind so I may change a sports utility vehicle back into a sports car dream, the high powered chariot with long low lines automatically ready for racing. Doesn’t matter how long it takes to arrive when this is what saves lives. I wanted to take an Uber to get where I was headed. I’m not scared to drive I’m only nervous my car’ll get damaged once it is identified and unguarded. I love my wheels. Mel Knox instead drives me to our local campus in a blueberry, originally, although empurpled by now, Dodge Stratus. Not oblong but low and extra long body. Dark and they almost look like they’re damp cloth backseats. No headrests. No surprise. No one likes these sedans as much as they adore the V-8’s found in Ford’s rear-wheel driven Crown Victorias. Four hundred forty seven thousand odometer miles visible. And a red mermaid shaped air freshener.
The session begins after I’m handed way too many story pages. I don’t stop to read them because I have to ask the room if we’re better off believing we know pointlessness is the point of anything. Where is Mia? No one knows. When I finally let them have the floor I regret it at once. Gunner, King, Ozzie dominate no particular portion of an impatient debatelessness. I want to explode. Why are they so busy pretending not one of them knows they have more than one very strong, sound, solid point of view on what they clearly did to thwart Grace Knox’s gifts? And why do I know I want them to’ve hurt her without proof? This is useless. I scowl like my brows say, these three are better than this. I say, “You’re gifted. The lot of you. Trust me. I never waste time slanting sunlight to style my respiration steam in winter or at night or whatever, unless I’m sincerely distracted by the cut of, or lack of solar flare, and the shadows climbing the walls. I don’t want more steam in my stories. I want the heat, why it snarls. Show me reptiles. The lizards climbing the walls.”
Devour your intuition, and then polish the performed wordplay, “Consider this, does the phrase, Haul off and hit somebody, a turn of playful words for a violent anecdotal recollection, work best or maybe better for driving? Or is just what we should use in throwing a haymaker through a glass jaw? Take, Punch it, too, because that applies to both specific universes of thematic action as well. Is it punching it, or what, to, Haul off and hit somebody? Think. Yelling and then he stormed outside. Everyone at the dive bar knew he’d haul off and hit somebody. I cannot make myself make a decision. And that’s maybe even better. Twice in this new Southern lifetime, they’ve down here tried to shoot the messenger when I called on them to account for their heinous actions. I’ll say this again, Even afterwards, you don’t own where you’ve failed. You’re impossibly corrupted by your delivering me good karma.”
Mel Knox takes me back to my dwelling in a GMC Denali with a University of Maryland Terrapins vanity license plate, “TERPS.” The big truck’s hood and doors and panels sport a wild clashing-endearingly too comfortably oddly colored Maryland flag paint job. Piano keys laid flat on the black and white leather interior. The hulk cuts across the fast into the exiting twin lanes. No traffic runs one way or the other. She’s hunched over the wheel with her head aswivel because she’s wearing a black hoodie with the hood up over both ears. She’s at work on the self-infliction of a far safer maneuvering. But she maintains the violent appearances of madness, we know who put your clothes on, and so I can say, “You did this to yourself.” Except what I really say is, “Today I said, Saying it makes you feel better, because I believe from behind the wheel, aggression becomes narcotic for the maniacal. The idea behind the acronym I-Y-K-Y-K nearly means the same as, Amen. You can only show what it means to people who already know what you know, can see what you mean when you show them you know this too.” Why do I know Mel Knox cannot say no to anything I say now? She wants my business back in her life in The Mermaid? No it’s deeper than that. Mel Knox looks at me and says, “Know what? Maybe it’s just not that deep.”
I want to ask what kinds of questions I’ve never wanted to answer. I’m only terrified I may remain scared to do so forever, therefore, if I were to make some sort of Major League debut tomorrow, then pitch this novel’s preeminent permanent publication to the public for when they want a new, private, South Caroline Steeze (style and ease), I’d begin with an overarching, irrational declaration (thereby destabilizing the personality of the listener, reader, friend of a friend, agent, potential put-me-on megastar penman I can ride coattails for until I surpass their own wildest expectations before they’re writing one sterling review’s sentence) that this maximization of my personality upon page after page is almost every single worthwhile thing I’m sure social media has missed about me. The other side will think, “Really? You think so?” And then goad me to, “Alright, have at it,” because if you’ve watched how one works through countless errors to become great, you’ll never buy the notion that one is great when it’s clear they have been great for longer than one was watching the one driven to forge celestial clockwork grow. And I’ll contradict all initial criticism on any countenance with one thumping notion, “Delusions of grandeur do not exist if and when one works this hard.” The next example I’ll share is how, “Kanye West might be my spirit animal,” because by now you might know I’m at the very least referring to a particular Maybach-centric punchline, before I’ll at most begin alluding to the wondrous white space in between my words as a personal miracle whipped up from soon owning two white Benzes.
And maybe my realizing how unbelievably cool I think my job is had to happen, a la classic blank-begets-blank, and this took place at, I’m not kidding, the exact same time I first grabbed a thick dark coffee mug for sipping sparkling leftover LaCroix; since I’ve been after an elegant solution that simply, works too well in the South, where every single glass beyond May First uncontrollably sweats - it seems like - the instantaneous splitting millisecond one sets one down and looks away. And so look at me look this way and walk with me as I ask you, Are the vital accumulations of any plot to be memorized dramatically more or less important than the potential vibrance of an enhanced esthetic experience within every individual sentence? IYKYK.
I’m arguing to argue, “On some invisible level, every individual piece of mania I’ve ever committed to has spun free the illegible thieving steps of way too many a good move. I’ve been sentenced to see to it that I seem like I should say, I don’t know how it happened.” The implication I don’t speak, “Things started working out.” If we take apart the novel’s un-scratch-able itches, ask about section structure, then I’ll implore you to answer what I should know beforehand so I don’t need to repeat my answer to the question, Is all this a downstroke’d anecdote template or has it always been the tight-rope walking temperature increases within a rich, slow-burning yarn? All the modern weather apps on our phones today’ll study these current climes to say, If you go back out again, you have to know it feels like one hundred ten degrees once finally finished accounting for the dire death blows of these hours held hostage by this unrivaled humidity of sweating momentary weakness.
In the stairwell’s shadow, I say, Position players pitching ninth innings feels like tipping a stripper more than twenty dollars for a lap dance, a time when everyone gets what they want done in a weird way. Is it a good thing I can unwittingly give you all of my bad habits if I’m just in some way sort of successful? Hyperactive superstition is running my hands through my hair when I spot my reflection. Eyes up. Adjust my shoulders. Complement the invisble decorum’s blazer I’ve now placed back on my back with a better posture. I pass out of and feel relieved from the overhead sunlit splash while sliding into a thick and splotched and stress-deadening shadow. I’m sweating some but I sense I’m more at ease, slowly more at home, though I’ve got no headphones on because I’ve coiled them into a loop, and another loop, and another overlapped over-loop, when I’m fifty eight, forty seven, thirty three, I have to count them down, seconds, beats, pulses, from the slick and gunmetal gray, and I cannot just call them gray, wide stone steps.
I’m the only one holding onto the left glass slab as I pass in through the silvered metallic threshold. When I hold wide the left slab - if anyone were near to me, I’m sure they’d prefer the right side of the road idea while - I pretend it’s no qualm I’d’ve been blocking any soul hurriedly running out through the right door. Then I’m in through the heavy door. I don’t touch the water fountain, nor gander at the trophy cabinet. Avert my gaze from the glowing double glass doors down the hall. Ignore the bombinating vending machine. Then left foot first on the first step after I finish facing away from a Freemasonville advertising television monitor’s rufescent and reddening and repeating penumbra.
The logo is handsome. But all screens zap my fixity. Everything changes when what you’ve manifested becomes wealth you must need not work for at all. So, then, tell yourself, go, get on with it. Get up. Get after it. Get going, moving, climbing. Overtly serious self-talk organizes my thought stream. In order to deftly accomplish anything, I have to avoid scrambling whenever I work too hard to calmly walk into talking myself through my own marching orders in however I maneuver within whatever comes up, comes out for these classes, sessions. I’m looking forward to again working within this office with Ozzie, King, Gunner. Mia and Grace need a new resource, have dropped my session entirely.
Stairwell, to landing One. Don’t grease these upstairs brass railings until the darker burnish - or is it polish? by friction, many hands, over how many decades? - gives off a classic jazz band brass’ horn bell luster. Stairwell, to landing Two. Release the rail altogether by the unsure but then rapid onrushing moment, where within that next mimetic - or is it kinetic? or neither? - crucial time when impatience fires and I feel more than I see two big steps pass under each evenly accelerating bounce, hop, trot, stride, bound, as if running up the stairs has been preeminent prerequisite when I’m alone, unwitnessed, since when, then, I finish the next flight at near full speed because I want the burst of a job well done. Velocity argues it must burn through my quads at, landing Three. Don’t loiter. Head straight through the hallway, hustle dead ahead, then hit the visceral thrill of the apex in a short turn. Gallop up the stairs three at a time and take two long strides to summit five more short stairs up onto, landing Four. And then I’m blasting down the longest tunnel on the left side of the west side of the building. And I become a barrel-chested lion-sized bullet train to anyone watching below as I race-walk down the all glass big window’d sky bridge until my breeze catches up with my body heat as I stand inside a refreshing darkness where I’m expectantly un-pocketing one single new aberration, the only silver key on the newest keyring I’ve since forever kept tucked in my left front pants pocket, or shorts, jeans, slacks, always the left front pocket, in the final five miniature little steps before unlocking the single old dead-bolted lock just below the scrabble-tile soft blonde brown doorknob I twist way too hard. Inside, the titanic wall of windows reminds me this released door’s tongue is not a spring-loaded vermin trap designed for bringing you and me to order, heel, attention. I’m here now for many reasons of my own devising, things I could never surmise, counseling young guns, and the new pencils not yet pens nor quills, a ruse: it brings you and me together, to agree, “Always wise you were bribed away from your false passionate purpose on this wretched beautiful azure marble.” Are we speaking of sky, water, solid land? Do you actually want answers? “By the time you steal back reincarnation, you deserve what you desire.”
The real story I’ve always told is I’ve always wanted a good reason to rationalize every single time I relapsed to avoid doing all the hard work. Teaching someone your novel as you’re writing the novel is defending your title as you’re winning it. Here we go, my class, Raw Southern Recognitions for the American Mystery within American Sports Mythology and Superstition. I instruct them on how and why and for what reasons ultra-fine aggression becomes narcotic for the maniacal.
Ford Mustang. Electric blue. Hard top. Windows down. The American muscle car sits unattended and idling beside the Shell station gas pump where Grace Knox tumbles into the nozzles and labels and steel framework. She bounces back. She moves forward as if no one saw her worst moment. All of it in and on digital film and immortalized. I slip inside a vehicle I know is not mine. I was driving her home from an AA meeting. That chrome horse on the grill is on the wheel and in my eye. This blue fleecing. Takes not more than one minute when I drive the blue Mustang around the short block, up the hill, to the edge. And when I return I walk into your frame like nothing has happened. That’s what you never saw in me, that’s what that was, like it loved to happen, I brought out my art of modern war’s blood sport wisdom when you spoke wrong for what happens when it thrashes. You thought it was a set-up? Guess what? Now you don’t know what to believe about this tower moment. You don’t know who to trust. You blame everyone around you as if they did what dirt you dug up out of the thin air’s conjure-fodder. You couldn’t accept what you did to that poor girl and made fiction a refuge for your mistakes until learning of a lightning strike called truth.
Until this morning in motion, walking and sweating and admitting without a word I’d have to drape my blazer across my left arm to make any more progress, I’d not openly admired my friend’s graciousness, admired that he’d not let me become admonished, how I know now he also knew that how his working with me refuted drifting recriminations I was an impossible person, an unkind head case, hot head, an unstable and uncut harbinger of codified destruction. In these too many months-long moments, if I were to assign myself the spirit of one tool above all? I was not a man amazing on a typewriter or keyboard, but rather a demon of a bulldozer in my language, an emotional juggler not here to become another hummingbird, and to extract truth in nectar, elixir, and a sugar-spun reality afly and above the desert dunes running into the ice water flowing. No, I learned transformation requires a private nosedive. To share this detail with any soul who’s not fire-walked this causeway, one’ll know the entrapment of trappings in televisual white noise static. As this becomes a Luciferian poetry, a streaming turbo rupture in reality arising from the surround, I’ve seen how thought and observation are twins that tailor their parts to pair, mirror, reflect synchronized waves. A shadow will swell and shape sure wings for she-wolves, she-devils, she-minxes, and blind you to your lost loves whom you play like a sport before the drugs hit your brain. And if you let go, and bifurcate your eyes until they alight within your perspective as a form of ultraviolet spectrum-full sprite-hunting tools, and the beauty bursts, a colored life-language elucidated by eliminating pointlessness begins rewiring these things I’ve desperately required since when I learned smoking the right kind of weed turns me into the best kind of hyper-productive money-lusting incisive sports journalism super savant. Who the fuck knew this mattering’d show me five levels of green lights?
Black Nissan Xterra. Trunk capacity packed full of camping gear. Four un-showered sweaty heads bobbing. Muddy snow melt runnel streaks up the back half’s left and right gray fenders begin liquefying into their older cascading compositions. Off-road tires. Spare tire exposed, the rubber becomes a lifted, fifth dimension. This entire trek gets tried once by the group because it began as a possibility of one kind of idea and now it’s a thing. Cinematic psychedelia coursing through nine mesh speakers. Remeber where you came from. Should art be on a level with everything else, anything else, or must one believe art better than everything, anything else in order to be a real artist? Does the question matter? Do questions matter? Square that with the best hasty scribbling in perfect journalism. Take some long days of uniquely explicit euphoria, and a personality befogged by unkind assertions, the consensus is always going to argue one doesn’t deserve these unlikely jubilations. Calling bullshit on this flawed self-deprecation is a private hustle better left dormant to the noise of notifying the surrounding world. Soon one learns it feels not fractionally but entirely better letting no one know how hard one works, personal progress victories turn, essentially, volcanic, exponential, and undoubtably mercurial. For how long do they last? In journalism the powerful must be sure they like the way you think more than like the way you write even though your writing is really the only one thing that matters. If I don’t understand any idea, I’ll decipher what I think, what I know, by writing uncalled-for, uncanny, and candid observations. When I’m at work I take great care to ensure I’m not unimaginably nervous, nor proud I’ll never flinch when I asked why I know that I stand not for loyalty but perhaps way too tall upon the valor to be had within ties through bioelectrical blood-oath-bonds in the use of very specific words. Is this a tick? A way to focus, when I know I otherwise cannot? For seventeen years I’ve demanded why I’m like this? What this thing is? It is trust, love, lower than sight, sound, when I read blue inkwells in the illest scrawl, piping real music. Melody. Harmony. Memory. Vivid. Mellifluous. Ecstatic.
Madness is never a too terribly funny thing when it clicks, when it alightning-flash-bang-dark-thunders and gets you to accept more than any modicum of a lot of luridly horrible personal details about yourself. The horrid muscular contortions of an inexplicable compassion are now an itch to justify its use, its existential facts, its form. What has happened today will again happen tomorrow and the next day as well. I’ll wonder how writers I revere most believe their best novels no slightly different than a bonafide geysering and gushing and writhing and thrashing avalanche, a massive thing that takes years to form, why they know they can write their oncoming onslaught overnight. Stained glass windows. Morse code. Polygraphs. Tattoos. The performance of one immaculate page of prose. Prophetic pyrotechnics. I unleash expectations. I levitate. I don’t question the undiluted potency depicted by one word. I’ve no picture without hearing the pulse play. It’s all here. Do you see? Unlike any phenomena, fantasia, feverish phantasmagoria, vibration is vivified in the reverberant word after word of a sentence. I don’t mistake nor overlook the miraculous gift of a severe wind, a sharp gem, no matter the speeding fluid impermanence spreading from capital lettered declarations rollercoastering and creating this magmatic singularity by the time one more orbicular jag touches down. If I’m drunk again. I’m set on fire. I’m breathing underwater. Motherfucking Merlin miracle.
What’s usually left after an uncalled-for flagrant insight flooding? If I’m pressed, What are you working with? I say, Psychotic situational awareness as a more extreme form of lavish and labyrinthine fawning. You’re doing what? Writing a novel. I’m hunting for honesty in truth, where clear waters arun flow freely from my thought stream to yours. Honest truth is rare and terribly tyrannical, it makes true novels royalty. This novel has more than asked it has demanded that you trick yourself into being entirely locked onto and inside the page, so you may finally take aim at the miracle I’ve wanted to make a pleasing smile from what I consider my barbaric mug, written down in a blunt, blatant discourse: here after thirty two years, this is what I once found and fondly believed was my only advantage, my novel, and what I would’ve also previously always found diabolically charming and cunning. I’ll admit, right now, presently, that, if I’m always rewriting it, then I’ve become primarily a paramount personal problem. I’m my own biggest problem when I know today I don’t know what all I’m going to want to do tomorrow. And nothing rolling on the road to self-redemption more resembles a miscomprehended machismo than a steroidal yet miniature ambulance-shaped hard cover novel arguing it isn’t the same comfort as colorful cartoons and cereal my inner child lived for when I thought life couldn’t get better than that dynamite combination of toxic stimulation.
I know what it looks like, I’m six foot four inches tall. I’m literally the bigger man now. But I slouched until I hit the second half of thirty years old. Proportions right, but body knowledge all wrong, off, crooked. The shoulders, the spine, the gait. After enough wrong attention paid to me for awakening enthusiastic, and following all the psychological fallout suffered during unwarranted attacks thereafter, it is nothing short of wonderful I can love something and anything at all, like another person. It is no wonder I paid adept and compulsively far too close attention to the effortless disfiguration of deeply repellent psychological hygiene’s completely complimenting my unwashed hair, my unshaved face, and every extra physical and kinetic propulsion I could wedge between my blind side and the things that hurt me first. But what fucks with my head the most is I can feel you and yours over here, all the way on this side. Your lively, decadent painful condition comes together from artful, dodgy victories, whenever immaculate joy spells out the kind of unpredictably wonderful day in which you get nothing done. This is your position, to know your role, and deflect all points of pride. If South Carolina is drunk on the pride of their truth? If I can spin this entire lurid hurricane in the correct direction? Everyone has to believe in a new Holy City, the second coming arising, this American passion. Nostalgia matters infinitely more when things work out mostly the way we want. Otherwise it is right here now our fearful regrets we fall from.
Charleston Charlemagne is just a name I give to the guy I like talking to outside my AA Home Group. I say to him, “We have identical goals, strategies, tactics.” He nods. My foot cramps. I lean hard, to the right, then add weight, and stretch through the menacing mutation of muscle as I realize it must look like I’ve gone from loom to dig-in-my-heels. My friend says, “Are you dangerous?” I say, “Do you believe in Charleston’s second city?” I hand him the pack and he flips the top open and takes it then plucks and lights a second bone from the peephole ember of the first. The Winston label drifts my way. I take it. I light another the same way too. He says, “We show similar styles. The writer. The actor. We steal from each other. If anything, we both know an entire universe is contained, or brought to light, encapsulated, by one well placed word.” I say, “Kanye West would call this example, sampling.” He says, “It’s stealing.” I say, “You’re right.” He says, “The right one word stolen then sardonically pedestal’d.” I say, “Again. And again. Again. And again. Again. And again.” He says, “Until it is well written the one new way it works, yes.” I say, “And again. And again. And again.” He says, “Deliver the missing in action their music, man.” I say, “Picture a peak performer arisen in an atmospheric rhythm.” He says, “Beats.” I say, “Kinetic writing is king.” He says, “As opposed to what, exactly?” I say, “Ever even one time pretending you cannot feel absolutely everything I do when I rainbow your mask and project you through it.” Modern English footballing’s top quality teams do not so much defeat their incompetent foes as they bludgeon lessers, shellack inferiors, punish their embittered enemies. Smoking, silence, slow burns, smoldering, it seems we’re both leading each other on now because we don’t know how to not promise creative lightning in a bottle. A good lie is one not reliantly credible, probable, or in any way trustworthy, believable, not a falsehood eliminating the load of what honestly burdens us either, never that alone, a good lie should not exist to protect anything, because one can’t just say nothing at all. No, a good lie’ll go out of its way to account for why deceit had to exist to begin with, why it had to burn, why it must replace the possibly graceful with the gruesome, grisly, grave, why it’s more honest than the truth, as it says to me, says to all y’all, rewritten enough already, and finished off finally, grant me the serenity to accept a life I cannot change, when it thrashes.