I’m sitting here listening to Townes Van Zandt…drinking…wondering what it means to be a genius. However megalomaniacal it may sound I always rather hoped it was within me, and it is egotistical of me, I admit it freely. I want to be a writer, and my heroes are JD Salinger and Joyce and Toni Morrison and Shakespeare and Toole and so what less can I expect of myself? I know I don’t have the great novel inside of me yet, but I always hoped it would come…but is it something that just comes along? And it is worth it to me if it does just waltz on up and say hello? Townes Van Zandt once glued all of his teeth together sniffing three tubes of airplane glue, he once fell out of a fourth floor balcony just to see what the moment between stability and falling felt like, he gave up everything to write songs and lived drunk in a trailer even after fame arrived…was he a genius because of these things or in spite of them? All I know is that I want to write words like his, that can reach through skin and flesh and eat into the cords of the heart’s own heart. Like this.

My days they are the highway kind
They only come to leave
But the leaving I don’t mind, it’s the coming that I crave
for the sun upon the ground
stand to throw a shadow, and watch it grow into a night
and fill a spinning sky

Well I don’t know too much for truth
but my heart knows how to pound
my legs know how to love someone
my voice knows how to sound
shame that’s it not enough, shame that it is a shame
follow the circle down, where would you be?

Well you’re the only one I want, and I’ve never heard your name
let’s hope we meet someday, if we don’t it’s all the same
and i’ll meet the ones between us, and be thinking ’bout you
and all the places I have seen
and why you were not there

That my sadness should be his sadness should be the sadness of so many others, who lives such sadness more fully? Words of raw power and strength and beauty seem to grace the burned out frames of addicts like cherry blossoms.

Fuck it, I’m just going to give up on what I was trying to say, it’s resisting my feeble efforts. The inspiration for all of this is the rejection of my novel by the agents who asked for exclusive reading rights, though I started thinking about it last night with no inspiration whatsoever…almost good enough but not quite and I know I should take it in stride and believe me I will tomorrow but not tonight, it’s a crap novel anyways, but I was quite hoping it could be considered a decent sort of crap. Even if all I’m good for at the moment is crap, it shall be the very best crap it can be, so I shall work on the fucking pacing and resubmit. But tonight? Tonight, I’m all for drunkeness and Mr. Van Zandt, I’m halfway to drunkeness already, I started early. If I’m still depressed tomorrow I might move on to my other favourite addict self-destructive singer songwriters…I shan’t start sniffing airplane glue however, no fears.