He was ecstatic with the joy of circumventing himself, or was that circumcising? What’s the difference anyway, it’s the rounding out, rounding about, severing through and lopping off, the cutting free as it were, the relief of one little less stump to worry about.
I cried often as a child, often to myself, often to the voices that comforted me and coaxed me to live one more day longer. Now I’ve gotten so used to living that the idea of death terrifies. I’m too comfortable in living, in my tidy thoughts as erratic and dismembered as they are. I’m not getting any younger and the more my youth escapes me, the more I wish to reboot the system and start over, knowing full well that it’s too late, all too late, I’m doomed on this path and there is no hope of ever living out my writing, or leading a writer’s life: peace, solitude and a little royalty check every month to cover the expense of a little house by the sea. Yeah, none of that for you boyo. You should never have gone to Bronx High School of Science to escape all those clowns who are now doctors and lawyers, never dropped out of high school because you couldn’t bear to live and all those clowns became stock brokers and scientists, never gone off to Albany (because John Jay was a good move although you fucked up there too, you got into a program that was excellent for the likes of you, that whole parallel and lateral thinking, that interdisciplinary shit you’re so keen on) and stayed for fucking five years investing in a doctoral program that was so mired in politics and pretension that by the end of it, by the time you busted your ass through the doctoral exams you couldn’t even write anymore, what good was that?
I feel a tremendous need to struggle out of this skin, rip the meat off the bones and exchange them for something else. I’ve grown fat, I am no longer lithe (I was always fat as a child, but then sprouted up and through rooftops in my teenage years; although I was no stunner then, you could see my cheekbones and the outlines of my abs), I am lethargic, suffering the beginnings of a mid-life crisis when I used to tell people I would not live past twenty.
I want a tattoo of my wife’s angelic face on my shoulder to comfort me when all the voices have left me, as they have been, one by one, over the years, leaving back alone in the darkness where they first found me, naked and churning, shivering, crawling, raking, waiting to breathe.
Mother, father please explain to me this blood in my veins, why it runs hot and cold, why I burn bridges and freeze out corners of my heart. Explain why I want to run away, not run backwards in time, but sideways and straight out of it, I want to keep my head together in death, even if that means living another life. Explain to me why there isn’t anything more than this and why this sack of meat lives so hard and true and clear like it’s all never supposed to end. Explain to me why when the world stops, I lose track of time and there’s so little time left even when there’s all the time in world? Explain to me when exactly I went mad because I cannot possibly be well like this. This is not the way I was supposed to leave the world, this is not supposed to be the life I would give my wife, my child. This is not supposed to be how things turned out in the end, especially when the end is nowhere near in sight.
Twist and twist it all around, trying to make the old sound new again. Reverb off the common sense and make the senses work to make sense of it. Everything old is new again only if you knock it out of shape.

in view of labors twirling on his tongue, he writes, he wishes he wrote more, he wished he lived more, sometimes he wishes for a life more than this one, where he was more than this one now writing the lament of writing a little less than one liked to, for living a little less than one liked to, for wishing for more than one would have taken the time to have wished for.
And sometimes, late at night, the terror grips me again, plucks my heart and fingers its valves. It’s only thirty years ahead at worst, but she laughs and says it’ll be like tomorrow and this memory will be like yesterday and i push all the breath out to keep from breathing death in.
I cannot write anymore about not writing or the desire to write or the lamentation of what i was and am and could have been. I should only write and be writing and think nothing else but the pushing on and her and between the sheets the fucking how good it was the other night, not nrew years night where she fucking me to make me cum there at the end tracing her finger along my nuts as she leaned back on top of me and i thought how unfair and i wanted more of it, but i knew she wasn’t having anymore of it and that’s what her on, what brought her fingernails on my scrotum and i thought how terrible unfair and ludicrous and terrifying to be bringing in the new year in this way considering that it marks you for the rest of the year, but not that time, the time before, where she was on top again and leaning out over the bed suspended like a bridge between ecstasy and something else that’s tender and soft and ain’t that just grand to feel something real when you’re holding her in your arms, suspending her across the shaft and you feel her lips, not the lips she smiles at you with, but the lips that accept your manhood for all little that it is, and it was so good because let’s face it you felt that you were so good and sometimes you need just that.
There he walks into a room and see that chairs toss asunder. I had helped him through that rough patch with her when she was stealing from their mother who might or might not have been my mother or aunt as well in another lifetime but it wasn’t the right time to ask about it besides that dog just got amputated from cancer and hobbled around.
I wish for things to stick themselves in my head like in Nylund’s Signal to Noise, where people speak to each other in metaphor’s but there’s also something not quite right about that and even he author himself writes the obvious of our times: the increasing complexity and strength of our communication devices brings about greater degrees of i(n)solation. I wish to be done with endings.
He walks into a room and find the phone ringing. He answers it although he hasn’t answered a phone in a long time. There is silence on the other end, a tangible quality like a back end of a window pane.
No, no that isn’t right either, but near the end of the page and I’m rusty.

The persistence of memory as it crawls through my skin: re-invention I think I came off to them as being stuffy or witty or over exerting myself into their clutches: “so you’re not in the doctorate program?” I wanted to ask “how do you know?” but I was afraid the answer was going to be like “well, what you said before about being the new guy and re-inventing yourself came off as something a first year MA would say just to get the ball rolling, you know” and he would look at me and add, “someone who didn’t know what the fuck they were talking about when confronted with the big leagues.”
And he would be absolutely right. Oh god, how I miss the falling of writing, the sky dive head over heel freedom of going anywhere and not having a thing to really say. To let it just all hang. To stare at this keyboard and slowly mouth out the words out of my head and just follow them without having to prove anything: to breathe instead administrating CPR to my literary corpse of lung sorts. To re-introduce myself to language and let it all hang about the rafters until it congealed on its own.
That’s why you haven’t been writing old boy: you’ve waiting for bestsellers when you haven’t dug around in the garbage enough: what happened to the fun of it old boy? Y’know, the doing and writing for writing’s sake, when it was all you had and you hung onto it like a vein.
Yes. I now understand when the shit is ready to fall out of my ass and I have to stop.
Later. Welcome home.

to start with her, because it had started with her. She had spread her legs at a point I’ll never remember and somebody must have PUSH! And out I came (and isn’t that strange that we never remember, blessed to never remember, that, but keep track of the day as the years go by)

to start with her because I did. This, this book did not start with her, but I’ll get to that at some point, maybe, maybe not, depending if I have much of other things to say, but I doubt that will happen, I will get to that because you’ll need a reason for all this, an explanation for these words, these inks stains that are never going to be seen as simply stains, but as ‘words’, as ‘never going to be seen as ink stains’ (and there’s something fascinating to all that, to the idea of writing on paper, drawing lines that mean much less than what the writer writes and much more, as in, other than what the writer intended)
to start with her and I write of things other than her

to star with her and the things that brought me to her, her to here, here to the life that had happened upon her. But the words: ‘life happened upon her.’ Listen to that, another digression from the start. Life happens upon us. We, in being born, did not ask of it. People, such as parents, are accidents. Nothing in life is ever planned out. One can say, ‘I will go out and do the laundry today’ and go out and very well do the laundry. One can then turn and say, ‘am I not now a prophet?,’ smirking. Yes and no: you did what you wanted but you did not expect for there to have been so few people at the laundromat; you did not expect to be caught staring at someone’s underwear by an eight year old girl; you did not expect for you to have lost a sock, or for the day to be sunny when the forecast was for rain. The fact that a car heeded the traffic light and did not mow you down while you were crossing the street; the fact that you are still living and breathing is a culmination of random events. You think you have control over your life and, to a very limited extent, you do. However, one never knows what people they will meet today, even if they’ve seen the same people for years. Point being: suddenly, every time, anytime, all the time, ‘suddenly you are alive and breathing and you have nothing to with it.’

to start with her, and it is very difficult after the initial push to continue. The idea fades or becomes something else until the motivation changes also. It had started as: ‘To start with her…’ and it is now: ‘My throat is dry. The phone has not rung. I am waiting. I am thinking ‘someone else has not called’, and I wonder if anything had happened. I am waiting for someone who is not the her of the moment, or the her that I began with, but an other her someone else entirely who, when I pay attention to, receives much of my attention. This other ‘her’ who we’ll get to at some later point other than this page.’ And, of course, it is much more than that. Lost in the translation, so to speak and so, to ‘speak’, much of the translation has to be lost or I wouldn’t be speaking, I’d be thinking, and I’ve done enough of that, for now. Now I cannot simply ‘think’, I don’t have much time, I need to think and write, that’s the point of this: to see how much will I think to write and what I write of my thinking. I don’t have much time to just think anymore than Life at its end

to start with her, that brought about me, that brought me up. That, the latter, I know, or most of, from about age 2, everything before is retelling, from her and a smattering of others, it is not much, not chronological I don’t think she has even tried to place it in some proper order, or maybe she does not want to speak of it, or maybe it’s left and a little sorrow rest in her mind for that blurry thing that was once the memory of her childhood. I think it’s a combination of it all, I could be very wrong. There are a limited amount of truths that one will get when one asks questions of another. There is only so far that another will let one prod. There is a border that defines another’s sanctuary, a place that nothing in the real world is allowed to trespass, a line that, once past it, even her son is held as a stranger.

and to start with what I know and don’t know; to piece the little I have and to start with her, by filling in the spaces around her, of what she had come into, of what was around her, and eventually, brought her here, to get here eventually; the here and now because I know more of that, of the her and now (But when one reads a novel, let’s say a mystery, with a number of pages missing in and in-between the beginning, can one ever understand where and what exactly is going on in the novel’ Can one actually see the ‘whole painting’ when it is not presented in its totality’ Is it the same painting’ Is the outcome and all the loose threads tied up just as neatly when one has not had all the facts’ But there is the limit of what can be asked, a point where one must understand and accept what one is given only, and to interpret as best as one could and to move on from there; to accept and discard; to, somehow, face incompleteness and, not fill the holes, but to move through and reach and forget)

she had started in a shack and born, literally, onto the earth, for there were no floors. Where she was born was in a shack and onto the earth, her mother giving birth without painkillers or delivery rooms or doctors or nurses; without any release except to give birth, to release the seventh child from her womb. To pause, to side step, to regard ‘the seventh child’: there were six previous others, five of which survived; four boys, two live to this day, and the rest were girls; three others came after the seventh, three more births, one of which was stillborn; the first birth to die was a set of male twins, that starved, or were strangled, depending or your point of view, from lack of their mother’s milk. It sounds harsh, almost inhumane to even consider such a possibility in this day and age, but this is not then. Then was a shack that a man and woman put together with their bare hands, where electricity was seen only at night, in the clouds of storms, where all their children were born in this shack, for there was no way to reach a doctor (he was in another village and that’s what doctors did: traveled within a particular ‘state’, for lack of a better word) and so, also, the majority of times without medical supervision and in the beginning, with a mid-wife until the mother could do it on her own, onto the earthen floor, in sunlight or candlelight, with, as the first born got older, one of the siblings running to the creek to fetch water (most probably; these things are imagined, assumed, filling gaps, for there was no running water, before they even had a pump, there was only the creek, five minutes away running time) and another cry, another baby.

this is mostly snippets, this starting, this moving in time back to proceed forth from now, to here. This not of her memory, it is what is left of mine from what she has told me. To break the sequence of the beginning and to have my own memory before: there, going home from somewhere, I do not remember, it does not matter