but i have good news and bad news. bad news is the little dog died. hit by a train. then he got hit by another train that dragged him a few miles until the children just wouldn’t shut up.
then the birds pecked at him. then the rats. then the ants. then the lice.
good news is all of them are full now and enjoying little naps all along the woods near the train tracks.
other good news is you still have the rest of today to buy your busblog books. just about half price. since tomorrow they’ll be flying off the shelves at the much more reasonable $19.
do you know i love you all for buying this thing? you don’t even know what it looks like. its not even named. it doesn’t even have a cover to judge it by and still you order em up like my ass was stephen king or some shit.
you know how many books ive written?
zip.
ah, those poetry chapbooks in college don’t count. maybe one counts since it got me laid, but they don’t really count.
when i was young and impressionable i would send those to publishing houses and to bob guccione each christmas with secret hopes that they’d fall for me and hire me up.
i appreciate all that you have done for me, dear readers, to get me hired on at the la times, but it looks that my path will be much like my boy bukowski and we’ll only be globally loved and paid in full when we’re old and fat and bald and near death.
so its cool.
i would much rather be like him than say joyce carol oates who is loved by all but couldn’t bust with the freestyle if you put a gun to her head. true story, in college i was an usher for arts and lectures and joyce carol did a reading from one of her silly books and people left and i asked my boss what’s the big deal about her and she said shes a genius and then two weeks later that scientist guy in the wheel chair showed up and didn’t say a word with his lips and captivated the crowd and made us laugh and laugh and laugh and ive done some public speaking in my day, make em laugh without moving your lips and you are a genius, son.
broham asks me to italicize when i interview people and dogs and fireplugs.
i appreciate his request i do and i understand how it all might seem like fingers on the blackboard, some of you can handle the lack of capital letters but grammar bad and make your imagination figure it all out and its just too much.
little do any of you know the classic works of another one of my unpaid idols, one mr. ronald sukenick, author of 98.6, Up, and my favorite Out which is out of print but for a limited time available to read on the Internet.
here’s a fun game, read Out and drink every time i rip off sukenick. then read buk and drink every time i rip him off. then read vonnegut, like karisa did and drink everytime i rip his ass off.
little known fact, i once sent Sukenick one of my poetry books and he sent me Vurt to review and i was so blown away that he even responded that i read the book in a week and then was so blown away by that book that i couldn’t write a word. i was typeless.
read Vurt and drink every time you see italics and see me rip his ass off too.
jd salinger, i rip him off just for fun. true story, i was at santa monica college for two years. at the end of the second year i got a C in history and i asked the lady if she could give me a B minus and she said you cannot write an essay to save your life. i said please i wont be able to transfer to ucsb unless i get a B in this class and she said i cannot in good conscious send you to a UC school with you being as bad of a writer as you are.
she meant it. that old bag. she looked back down at her papers and the discussion was over.
i started crying. i don’t cry. i didn’t cry much then. but i started crying. i cried to the library. all my best laid plans were gone. i would have to go back to the electronics store a failure, i had already given them my two weeks notice. i would have to spend six more months selling tvs just so i could retake history and get a better grade. i cried on my way to the library. i passed people who saw me crying and i didn’t care. got to the library and just roamed the stacks like i would do all through college. and i found myself in front of jd salinger, my hero at the time and i cracked open nine stories, perfect day for bananafish and i read it and i thought, if this is how you write, shes right, im really not a writer.
took the money i saved for college, flew to europe, turned twenty-one in florence kissed a girl at octoberfest and realized that i might not be a writer or a good student but by the way, what was i talking about?
oh yeah, i have been getting some foul emails from people who read ashley’s diary. let me say this once, kids. not everything that i write in here is true, and that can be said for your little friend over there too. when i last left her she said a lot of things that she didn’t feel necessary to say over there. and i think shes either lying to me or you. and until she sets the record straight shes lying to both of us.
no where in her tale does she say that she has any regrets, meanwhile that’s all she said to me. so before you judge me, which none of you could, get the entire story told to you, the entire story. and then ask yourself if i had done what she did and then crawled into her bed, what names would you call me then?
unimaginative children doomed to repeat the failures of your family and friends believing the pouts of a princess permanently tied to an idiot young dumb and full of sound and fury signifying nothing.