Maybe I will drop it again. The entire revolutionary left wing act. I suppose I never had it. I suppose I will not go right wing either, nor will I delete what I've written. Or perhaps I should just say "erase"- to be more old fashioned. But maybe , what the hell, I will drop it all the same , and start to try to sink back to ...whoever I used to be. Not just here in reality of course, but also here , perhaps where it counts even more, upon the page. I will stop being a son of a bitch and I will stop writing about women, and queers, and freaks, and all those other unmentionable and probably unsellable things I write about.

I will (how I must admit it does sadden me) rewind the clock, yet again. Back to here. Back to now. No more spaceships. No more robots. No more plastic surgeries where I can  have a scientist switch a mans gender 40 times in one day and have him get raped and become a cross dresser and fall in love with a buff hairy pirate on a penal colony somewhere in Australia. No. Son of a bitch. I'll reroute. I'll go backwards. To the place where the flame was initially forged. The simple shit will come back to me. The simple plots. The stories set with simple people in simple places. I will, god forbid, maybe even write about people who are married and have children, even though I kind of must admit I hate them. But does that mean I ought not write about them? And shut them off entirely? Just because I hate them?

 I hate the Devil yet he often comes up. So perhaps it ought to be the same with this. I must find a salt of the earth subject . Maybe I went too far down the revolutionary line to the point where I'm just plain confused now. I need to refocus. Shouldn't I want to write a new All Quiet on the Western Front or Across the river and into the trees or White fang? Shouldn't I want to write like this Cormac McCarthy fellow whose still using a typewriter in the new century ? Blood Meridian? The people - they find him solid. Oprah gave him love.

If they read me, they would find me, I fear, weak. I simply write too often of faggotry. I somehow became enamored with faggotry. It's polluted all my writing. I often write in fact with one hand on my hammer.

Note the following just for an example:

He grabbed my ass and squeezed it fiercely. The only light in the bathroom was a little glow lamp that cast a dark illumination and kept changing colors from pink to red to blue. I could hear he had the tattoo gun on him and it was buzzing.

They had cuffed my hands to a pipe, and I had been there for almost 2 hours.

Embarassing isn't it? God almighty it sure is- especially when you consider the fact, again, that I originally started out walking this road of writing and all this telling myself that I was going  take inspiration from John Ford movies from the 1930s like  the Grapes of Wrath and My Darling Clementine. I was going to be the new Clint Eastwood. I was going to appeal to ...men. To a male demographic. A straight male demographic. That was, believe it or not, my initial plan. Before this began:

He caressed my cheek and my jaw lightly  with his hand. It felt nice. Then it started to move down my throat, to my chest. It felt even nicer.

His hands were freezing , he had just come in from the cold & there was  basically a blizzard outside, but I dug it. I had on an oversized flannel and it was opened up pretty wide, my tits basically falling out of it , no bra on. His hand moved further down , he started to rub one, my left tit.

 I drifted god damn far didn't I, lord? Sure did. I almost - I know it sounds preposterous --- but considering where I began, I almost feel like some crippled, alcoholic Amish Mennonite or something who drifted millions of miles from where those folks live in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. I feel like some sort of madman, really. How did I go from wanting to write the next searing gritty All American masculine novel of ultra manliness to suddenly writing about wanting to literally not be a man? But instead a woman? And have tits and get ...well you know. Bad things done to me.

I don't know exactly how it began. It's all really very vague when I try to recall. In 2012 I was still trying to write normally. Also in 2013-2014, more or less. It really only started some time in 2015, I think. Something changed in me over the summer of 2015 ....I began to discover new avenues of expression & "artistic liberation" I had never previously considered . Things started to look different. I had traveled overseas. Old people left my life, some people I loved were no longer even alive, and other new ones whom I would have never been friends with before had entered. A period of growth, you might say, began to occur.

And Charaxters  I had cherished for pretty much a decade by that point, (Indians and Cowboys and 1800s people etc, medieval stuff)  began to sound not just stale to me- but almost dangerously old. Suddenly a switch occurred and for the first time in my life that stuff truly seemed old.

 I finally heard what it seemed so many others heard.  I finally started to even crave new stuff. New music. New songs. New films. It was like it happened honestly overnight. I look at it now and it's almost as though I had examined that old folk lore Wild West, pre 70s, "analog" , "agricultural" world so heavy that I almost , as an artist, it was like I had to finally rip myself from it or it was going to end me.

In a big way, it was actually like I had to go *back* home ..which I understand might sound odd after what I said before , but is actually the case since I kind of started out a freak and then, later, tried my hand at the quasi conservative  act , examining and even immersing myself in history with a capital H; and....well, I don't know, I still just don't know. I can do it but I can't do it. I can enjoy but I can't enjoy it. It tires me out but it's at once so filled with mystery and darkness.

New age liberals often  think they are dark. Sometimes they are. Metal bands are certainly strange and I would personally call those liberal things. But the actual conservative base ,just like those Amish Mennonites , it has something *truly dark * about it , in the sense that it's almost a place void of any real light. People who want tradition and who are very serious about tradition tend to be very weird--almost emotionless at times. They don't really dance, the majority of jokes are "inappropriate" for them- they are generally just sort of somber and quiet. Conservatives , after all, like to worship everything about culture as it was *before* the advent of the tech. They worship an old idea of the world. They are "stoic". And what's interesting to me is that when I was working primarily as a songwriter , where you'd think these ideas might not hold up, they actually held up pretty damn well. But then almost the second I decided to switch gears completely into prose, they collapsed entirely. And I mean entirely. This was all what happened in the summer of 2015 to me really.

For example, as a songwriter , I am still fairly inspired, it seems , by more or less similar stuff . I liked, as I said , a lot of old songs about old things. The song I was listening to and singing this morning with my guitar is from the 1800s and  goes like this in the first verse:

Oh, me and my cousin, one Arthur McBride
As we went a-walkin' down by the seaside
Now mark what followed and what did betide
For it bein' on Christmas mornin'
Now, for recreation, we went on a tramp
And we met sergeant Napper and corporal Vamp
And a little wee drummer intending to camp
For the day bein' pleasant and charmin'

What  I find so intriguing is that, As a character in a song , I find this character and his cousin Arthur McBride to he absolutely fascinating. I could and have, after all, had periods where I have sang this song around the clock for days, and if I had gigs lined up somehow tomorrow and my own band, I guarantee you I could probably travel across the entirety of the country singing it night after night , every night, for years. And yet, for all this love I have for Arthur and his idealized past here in this tune, guess what? The second he's in a novel I generally just start fucking snoring. Bad. Like, in truth, I'm at the point where I almost not only can hardly read old books with old settings et cetera, but I almost can't even bear them , for a moment. They bore the ever living hell out of me. Literally. For some reason when I read or of course when I write , I am obsessed with chasing something new. I like weird characters . Queers. People with weird names , weird costumes. Vulgar people. Lunatics. Completely out of the ordinary and truly weird characters. Someone like Arthur McBride, as awesome as he is, just looks suffocating to me on the page. And I suppose it might just be because he simply becomes too complete there.

The truth is that songs about old things seem to have a magic that books sort of lose and I think that was why the "transfer" from old to new happened so fast for me once I made the decision to really get serious with literature. ....

So on second thought you know what? Fuck it! I ain't changing. I ain't rerouting or any of that bullshit . I'm staying where I am--- hell im gonna go even further. I gotta forget my old line. I gotta go with the freaks. I gotta keep EVOLVING. I gotta keep finding new roads to burn down. Yes yes ye Indeed

---notes