Gorilla Out of Shoulder Blades

In the literary genre, there are better and lesser credits, just as in journalism. The brand name credits have always alluded me, sometimes by a nose. APR hexed me as an undergraduate, handwriting a precious consolation note beneath its then 1983 standard rejection slip: "sorry to say no!". Even as a student I was baffled. WTF did it mean? I have supported APR intermittently, and would and shall continue to do so, with the luxury of resource, even if I never get a slice of their space, but like Kenyon, APR is a status brand; in marketing terms, I have few of these, the best being a minority anthology out of Pittsburgh, another fallow destitute period where I abused the young man who accepted me in it-- and yet, even today, simply by taking blind aim, I wind up in the laps of African American scholars who see my suffering as a corresponding voice to their historical memory: I had the gall, if you like, to ask one of these if she might consider writing a forward to my long tortured poetry manuscript, the strongest of them. "I am not sure I am the right person," she wrote, but if I do trouble her with it, why does such hypocrisy offer momentary glee? My psyche is far more interesting than that of Lee Doty's nurse (to pick an old scab).

I make the damnest effort to stay away from lesser known student journals, precisely because of the scaffold of credits I do have, but this is because of a towering giant who is no more. Len was truly independent, and he never humiliated me as did the Poets and Writers community, but I am caught with my zipper painfully pinching my crotch: I am too established not to ignore a great deal of what Allison transmits and writing magazines advertise, but cannot limit myself to APR and the Atlantic, creatively, and expect to survive. I am even less as a freelance journalist, but face nearly the same difficulty in getting commissioned for content. The digital world imploded an already wobbly pay for play patronage system: It killed Len's singular loyalty driven Small Press Review. I miss what the man meant to me.

Almost Less Than 24 Hours

The last time I sought emergency mental health services was between 1999 and 2000, after Linda was finished playing politics on my economic desperation. I do not bring it up to keep reviewing the respective prisms through which my former supervisor and I saw our interaction. It simply all boils down to the same thing: the image of my brother looking desperate, rabid, while my immediate family commiserated with the juvenile psychiatrist. This crisis wasn't about me, my immobility, but my younger brother's cathartic violence. He died a rapist and a vandal, wasted by AIDS, and I write this for anyone who cares to click the flag to read: I was pissed, majorly, about being pulled from my midterms to talk about Nicholas, and yet I'm pretty much the same, absent the desire to commit sexual violence, as such. My parents were a bad cocktail, a stereotypical Roman male with that singular Italian fury, and a beautiful but suicidal manic who ate her way out of her looks, a couple who manufactured two cripples and a dead sociopath, with my so called normal sister and her fucked up family.

"You need help," my sister's refrain after the CIL got done doing to me what it does to nearly everyone. There are variations: Dr. David Ward trying to get me to accept that I was clinically depressed, before CILS had a legal mandate, or my history instructor before that, trying to intercede in my life so he could sail me off to Harvard. Until I grew up some and got hit with the Tassoni thunderbolt, I wanted to marry Mr. Bruno, smiling at the normal puppy things. 

I should not write this, but despite the fact I am not at the Jayne Anne Phillips level, particularly since I am not a novelist-- and might have a little more change to bring my entitlement up a couple thousand if I was-- be that as it may-- I am fucking tired of the literary submission scene, but I can also never rise to the level of lawyer journalists like Jennifer Rubin, along with the others in her class. My withdrawal is pounding on me, yes, and my lunging hate (my audience should be so glad I am a quadriplegic, as I seem to have inherited Julius Caesar's thirst for war, or I am the -- never mind-- I cannot make my psyche complimentary to spree killers, though I have already) boils like a Georgia peach zombie wresting with the next vulnerable cast member. Even if I give my notice, flee, setting myself up for an unknown sleaze bag house arrest, I've past the point of revitalization, despite the fact that just as Virginia Woolf, we can push an exclamation point on the ecstatic. My fans who used to send me letters said "we'd never try to make a living as a writer," and I certainly never intended to, but re-matriculation? The harder I try, the crueler it becomes. 

The Ellsberg Anarchism

"Crimson and Clover"-- The Shondells

Normally, I automatically delete the majority of chapbook contests Allison Joseph transmits, but Brain Mill caught my eye, despite that it apparently overflows with generational neo-liberalism. I logged on to check the site for fees and to look for its open poetry series for the month of June, only there seems to be a contradiction between what the email instructs and the links on the site. My lack of sympathy for the five zillion MFA programs within the college of arts academies may be construed as my lack of success within it, but only in part. I am increasingly conservative, with more than trace elements of libertarian sentiment (despite free press antagonism to Peter Thiel) and most writing programs have wallflower multicultural codes already implanted within them-- not that they don't produce good writers, but, with varying exceptions, like David Mitchell, they're all the same, variations in style, technique, notwithstanding.

I have not had a good Monday, and left my key rope on the table because I became distracted, got back to Riverside, plowshared the office like an enemy combatant, exhaustively plopped on mattress sinkhole, today succeeded with my odd trick of getting up exactly on time for a program, and casually measured my emotional pain as self-mutilating, easing, mildly, with chili, burrowing in on the last of my usage before an overage.

It is not a good time to be me, the angry, race baiting militant. You might ask me what I want, within my episodic battles with the Presbyterian modus operandi I now mostly have what I want, being left alone, cleaning up after my dead Vinnie, battling kimmy's stubborn temperament, all apartment dwellings have tenant frictions, and before I inducted myself in Presby's sandpit, I was in Marie's row home, dirty and straggling as reverted to form in my fifties, dumping my commode stool in her back alley. The chip on my shoulder is over my lack of choice. I was this close to getting my own mortgage in 1994, and now, my only options are grin, bear it, or give my notice, then ask myself how I'm supposed to defecate when push comes to shove, if I turn myself out, hence Brain Mill's "Love & Mercy" theme caught my eye, in the turmoil of my own scourge:

I am going to write this, twitter and Google be damned: FBI director James Comey, the swarming liberal apologia for law enforcement's lack of willingness to behave like a police state with Mateen, can go fuck itself, royally. It behaves like a police state with me. I cannot move, and I've been stuck here thirty years, with a near insurmountable ability to restore my economic freedom. 

If The Pentagon Papers changed public perception to the extent Ellsberg's vindication would have it, we would have never fought the Iraq War.

Pricetag failure

Had I succeeded with the freelance proposal I submitted on this day, I would have been 250 dollars richer, just as, had Beasley kept his word, I would have had an additional 55 towards housekeeping. Adds up. The amounts involved would have been long gone since, but any amount is better than zero. I have slowed down, due to transitioning between accounts, and other activities you have read about above, but I also have to get better, honing trade market to idea, so I have retracted slightly into the old paradigm under which most writers get no money at all, and that is, leaning on my own hardcopy development.

I am going to let you in on a small secret that will make me even more popular with literary and independent magazine editors. Yessssss, reading recent issues matters, but not really, not for the classifieds from my former MFA syndicate. You learn after a while it is like a lottery. Get creative enough with your imagery and some editor somewhere will offer you a blow job or tit nibble. It may not be the high end, like Paris Review, or my near obsession, a before death correspondent byline in Atlantic Monthly, and note, I did not say fiction, or poetry, but an article, but anything you scribble, someone will give you space for it without pay.

Now, real freelancing, the hard stuff, the trades, policy wonks, medical, health-- that, my children, is where sources and study actually matters, and it still is not easy to do. Off contract, I hit pay dirt three or four times. Creative writing is useless, and no one will tell you that, because terminal degree holders need a job. Writing to earn a living is not the same as a novelist who gets lucky and then has a marketable franchise. It was not easy before digital and Amazon squeezed the purse, and it is worse now.

Able bodied writers do get day jobs of course, but you know I am a quadriplegic, and my special transit access curbed, along with the usual violins. Listen to your teachers, if not me, and vice versa. Go to law school, become a CPA, have a fallback. This is a brutal game. What was my idea? Hearing loss, and I fumbled. Next bullseye.