the rules of the game are thus:

first you live
and then you die.

until you die, you must go on living, going on living as though you intend to go on living forever.

you can be happy or sad. curious or incurious. you can be as cool as a cucumber, or as hot and bothered as the proverbial potato. you can go gently into that good night, or you can rage, rage against the dying of the light. you can be good, or bad, dogmatic, phlegmatic, charismatic, enigmatic, automatic, systematic, hydromatic. you can be greased fucking lightning. it matters not. all that matters is to go on living.

you are an iridescent fly in a gorgeous, gigantic, galactically-spanning spider’s web, and your job, your fate, your karma if you will, is neither to escape, nor to give up, but to struggle and buzz and fight, futilely, until one day, you die, and become part of the spider.

you are but one of billions of flies, every one vibrating with passionate, purple intensity, dancing and dreaming, scheming and screaming, shimmering like semi-precious stones, like rainbow reflections in dewdrops, going nowhere, and doing nothing but dying.

---

A world of dew
and within each dewdrop
a world of struggle.

Kobayashi Issa

---

i write so that i know i haven’t given up on being a writer.

i draw so that i know i haven’t given up on being an artist.

i stay calm when things go wrong so that i can tell myself, and occasionally believe, that i’m a person who stays calm when things go wrong.

my continued existence is contingent on the continuous rewriting of this increasingly implausible autobiographical fantasy, this extraordinary fiction, this everchanging self-made mythos, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. you might say, as sinatra so succinctly put it, that’s life.

you see, these are the stories i tell myself in order to survive, and i tell myself that there must be some modicum of truth to them, some smidge, some whisper, some suggestion, some suspicion, some something or other or i’d never let myself get taken in by them.

i let myself get taken in by them so that i know i haven’t given up on my impossible dreams.

---

This world of dew
is only a world of dew –
and yet.

Kobayashi Issa

---

pseudoliterary is a metaphor
for what
i’m not sure

but something
important
sounding

not
actually
important

not being what you’re supposed to be
doing what you’re supposed to be not doing
feeling what you’re supposed to be not feeling
and understanding

pseudoliterary is not a product
pseudoliterary is a byproduct

now buy my byproduct

---

The cow, taking a big 
dreamy crap, turning
to look at me

Jack Kerouac

---