chapter four: white lady loves you more

it's exactly as I predicted: nil for eight on accepted submissions since I started college. if only I had the self respect to call it a day. accept the fact that, hey, my "get" factor has diminished substantially since I graduated high school, and who am I to suggest that I've made up for any of that decay with real talent. what have I got to back up the claim that, sure, I'm a few months older, but these words sounds so nice together, you won't notice the thousands more college students writing fiction than there are high school students. ignore the exponentially stacked odds the competition has against me! I can spell tuesday really fucking well!

times like these, hesiod sticks on the way down and nothing but jesus sounds like an actual solution. do I become a poet of the every day? do I do salvia, starve for forty days and reel around in my little drawn circle, tempting demons to cross this line, or that one, tempting god with double standards, wringing the earth dry until everything physical bleeds out and into itself? do I buy a pair of purple sunglasses and watch the kingdom of heaven on television? shouldn't I?

that would be a good television show. the kingdom of heaven. readers could call in. there could be a toll-free phone drawing. if somebody famous picked up, you'd describe to them your most perfect vision of heaven. (without, of course, knowing what happens next.) then alec baldwin or joan rivers or errol flynn would inform you that you were invited to the show's studio lot in santa barbara, where you would be surrounded by your family and friends, your most distant aquaintances, people whose funny stories you overheard on the bus, girls that smiled at you in mirrors, helpful secretaries, bosses, coworkers, all the friends you ever had would get on a plane and show up in santa barbara. and they'd have a chair for you to sit in- not a throne, that would be gay- a chair. a nice chair. that would be the only thing your vision of paradise must include: a chair. the same chair for every episode. so we know whose idea it all is.

and the episode would go on for hours, tracking people in their most intimate, shuddering, quiet, paroxysms of awareness: you can't point to a place and say, the kingdom of heaven is HERE, or THERE, they'd realize, the thought would visibly shudder through their skin, spit out their nerve endings and wrap around them like a glove or a pair of the strongest, warmest, most loving arms which this universe can allow to exist: the kingdom of heaven is within AND/OR among you, they'd know it down to the last combusting neuron, to the last stumbling wave of endorphin and adrenaline, flooding their brains while they rode over its crest on hand-made arks.