It’s been a long time.

SInce I fell in love with – with her? With it?

I don’t know if it was a person — a real flesh-and-blood person, a dream person, or just someone I made up. BUt I fell in love in a way that changed my life.

Or maybe it wasn’t a person; maybe it was with a story; or with the process itself; words becoming dialog, story, people who live, die, bleed, fuck, hate, and love.

But it was love that changed me. Love for that person or thing or process; but love.

But the other thing was rage.

HAte would be the easy works to call it; as a metaphor it seems more powerful. l-o-v-e and h-a-t-e across the knuckles. We like bialy ideas, things in balance. We like good and evil because they’re at war, but they define each other (without an opposite point on a scale, we have no scale; no hot leaves no cold, no bad leaves no good. We have a constant state, not polar ends with gradients between.

But hate is a word – like love – which says to little in itself, and is invested with two many other notions. We define it as an opposite, on an invented scale. We imbue it with power, cultural and spiritual. That’s a strong word, we caution our children, when they chirp ‘you know what i really hate?’

HAte means took little and is wrapped in two much; and worse, it simply doesn’t say what I mean to say.

Rage is better. Rage isn’t hatred; rage isn’t cold, seething. Rage does not plan or simmer low; rage explodes, screaming, scratching, biting.

Rage is a mind-full of oxytocin, epinephrine, corticotropin-releasing hormones; it’s a vein-shot of things that makes the mind and body go, that ready it for action, for fight (or for flight).

Rage is powerful – and rage is profoundly stupid. Hate, in the context of novels, is the plot of a cozy set on a train leaving istanbul. Hate is in the mind; it’s a series of choices, it’s a state one holds in cooperation with the hind-brain. One feeds and treasures hate.

Rage – just is. IT’s the hard wiring, the nerves, the animal brain. IT’s an artifact of an era when we had leap from a tree with a pointed stick, psyched out of our minds on the pituitary cocktail of hormones that prepare is to fight and kill, or run and live.

Rage is a fucking high; hate is a low.

PArt of what drives me isn’t love, or the need to create. It’s some other need; control, drive, destroy, consume. Rage moves me, breaks me out of complacency and lethargy. Rage gets things done.

When I dreamed of a woman who seemed as real as anyone I’d ever kissed, touched or loved, I awake suffused not simply with lust (and yes, with lust, it was that sort of dream); I awoke suffused with something like, love, and in fact something like rage. The loss – a woman I’d met, and fucked, and loved, and needed was taken away by the simple act of waking from sleep.

She would go, and I could not let her – I had to take control of her and make her mine.

But I knew already – again, hat rage in the pack of my skull – that she was something of dream, something of ether, something impossible. She could do only two things, once brought forth into some sort of real world; she could break hearts, and she could die. And I was going to have to kill her.

Along the way, there was violence, blood, rage, hearts broken, love, carnage, and death.

Blood drips from the writer’s pen, all too often.

I wish I’d written this.

I almost wish Bukowski‘d written this, but then it wouldn’t be quite as cool.

In fact Ray Carver wrote it – in circumstances I do not know. But he brilliantly captures both Bukowski’s voice and his own in one single piece. I don’t understand how he did it; but if you’ve heard Hank read, you know the tone, and this piece hums with it.

Bukowski’s one of my personal heros. I know many writers who say the same of Carver; and yes, he’s brilliant, yet I’ve not truly found him yet, i’ve not gotten in a deep and fundamental sense why people love him the way they do. Possibly I need to write twenty or thirty more short stories to get it.

That aside – You Don’t know What Love is.

Read more “You don’t know what love is Bukowski said”

SFGate has a fantastic writeup of my friend Lewis’ new book, The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop.

Just as John Masefield’s classic poem “Sea Fever” captures the ocean’s age-old call, Lewis Buzbee defines the equally seductive attraction of the bookstore. Whether a sea of books or a large body of water, the siren call that each exerts is undeniable.
     –Robert Walch, SFGAte

I’ll admit I haven’t read the book yet, it’s in my stack. I kind of want to get Lewis to autograph the thing first. But this book covers a lot of my old stomping grounds, Upstart Crow and Company in Campbell, Printers Inc. in Palo Alto; stores where my mother worked (She and Lewis were co workers, as well as life-long friends, and my mother is a key character in Lewis’ book).

I remember Lewis as the snide, intimidatingly funny almost-big-brother who used to go to rock concerts with us, who’d sit around smoking dope and playing trivial pursuit all night with my brother and I and my aunt. He was one of the people who made me want to be a writer, and one of the first people, outside the group of erotica writers I know, to whom I showed Wanton to; one of the people who told me that I wasn’t just a guy who could write hot porn, but that maybe I was actually as writer.

Here’s to Lewis, who’s been working for that dream since he was a teenager – the dream of being a writer. You’re there, man, and no two ways about it.

Ok, I need some reference.

Anyone out there ever been in the Village Vanguard in NYC?

I’m working on something – a jazz-flavored piece set in around 1960, 1961. But I need some reference for what the area of NY is like, and what the club looks like inside. I’m just trying to fill in the scene in my head, the specific details don’t matter so much as background texture.

Anyone?

(It’s either that or make this shit up. Which I can do…)

Damn, I wish I’d had some un-interrupted time to write this morning.

I had a dream, some woman dredged from my subconscious. A person as complete and real and defined as any dream I’ve had in years. The last time I had a dream like this, about a person this real, that dream grew into Wanton, my novella.

I woke up with my head full of this girl – young, tattooed all over her back and shoulders with vivid images, plants and birds and colorful insects, curly haired, wearing hippie/gypsy sort of jewelry. She was wearing tiny round glasses.

I wanted to write out the dream, because I could feel a story forming in my head around this woman. I had the setting, the edges of a plot. And the scent of her, the feel of her skin.

It’s sliding away now, hours later, and I fear before I have time to write it, it’ll be gone.

I actually have a story most of the way done. I hit the ending, though it needs a lotta editing. But I finally hit a stride today and the words started to come, and I had that “don’t stop don’t stop” feeling I get when the writing is working.

Now if I can switch into edit and re-write mode I might have something to put up in public soon. It’s been a while, not since the dirty xmas story last winter.

Fingers crossed…

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I’m just aching to write something and I can’t seem to find the time.

I’ve read a few very good pieces of erotica lately that friends have sent me, and looked at some tasty pictures, and I feel incredibly inspired. I want to write something short and direct without getting over-involved in the plot and characters, which is my typical failing. I get too ambitious about writing some complicated character piece and the sex becomes secondary.

I’m there, right now. I’m ready to do it. And I can’t seem to find a couple of un-interrupted hours to get down and write. I can’t do fiction in little bites, I need to find the zone and go, and keep going until it’s done.

A couple of blogger friends recently sent me fan mail about some of my previous work, and it’s both inspirational and intimidating. I can do it, I’m reminded, I can write. But have that garp problem of writing something I now feel I have to live up to.

When I started this blog (fuck me, is it a year and a half ago already?), it was to be about writing. It’s in many ways gone far afield of that. I need to get back there and get something done that I can publish, if only here.

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