To tell you the truth, the hack science fiction writer, call him Jack Dulouz, or Tranowsky, or Kilgore Trout, or any personality that mystical men have taken upon themselves, obviously with embarrassment, sometimes with efforts of branding, probably secretly ashamed, so ashamed that they must bury their own personalities deep within great works of the most existential kind, Moby Dick, Huckleberry Finn...  telling the truths they know of the world through subterfuge, spies upon themselves released through the act of writing as best they can....  To tell you the truth, the hack science fiction was tired of his job of enacting the life of a Christian as best he could.  He was tired of something, or many things, and felt often like crying.  He was tired of the physical aspect, the waiting on people.

He was tired of the war, he was tired of millions of self-important people all trying to be louder and more correct, he was tired of all the people he knew through work who did not give two shits about his life, his future, his well-being, at least practically speaking, not that it fell on them to provide him pension when they had no extra.  It even took one of the mathematical economist types to drive the point home, to explain to him, what he already knew, how totally unprepared for a decent life he was, one night in the bar up the street at the end of the week.  He was tired of the ironies of his friends keeping him late, when he was tired and hungry.  He was tired of co-workers who left him the lurch, and it had all become boring and uninteresting.  Something he should have seen, or rather, knew, a long time ago.  Such is life.  And what he longed to do might have belonged to a great Russian short story, to just walk away, to walk away with your backpack and the basics, just to walk back home, even though, of course, there really was no such thing.

For most it's simple.  Go out and socialize.  Try belonging somewhere.  At least get out for a walk.  Do something healthy.

How would he walk home, anyway?  Would he walk all the way up Route 81 through Pennslyvania in the hero epic poem movie of it?  Would he walk up a grassy dirt road, and cross a stream, and then see the village in the distance...  If only...  There was no such place, beyond his mother's apartment complex way up there.  To do so anyway would have instantly represented the greatest of failure, and one is not supposed to fail in life.

Would he don a white robe and a staff and go out walking, to teach...

It was all so incomprehensible.  This was the primary feature of the whole mess.  Every step had been wrong.  What could you do now?

Some of us are simply incapable of being happy.  We go on, and on and on, but eventually it catches up with you.  Then you realize, you'll never be happy, truly happy.  It's too late.

The day comes when you realize this, your own fault, nobody else's, and this makes it hard to reach out.  Makes it hard to feel any belonging.

Providing others with happiness fills the hole in your life "where your own joys should be."  Of course, that's the restaurant business....

So, in preparing to make any change, you have a sense that it will only bring more of the same...

Is there some great flaw in you, which makes you this way...  Writing, therefore, is some kind of a pose.  There are some satisfactions to it, but it is too self-derived.


It was one of those days, and fortunately they do not happen so often.  It all felt real enough.  As an excuse, sort of to avoid everything, after talking with his mom several times and each times feeling lonelier and a bit more desperate, he needed to get out of the house.  The neighbors were having a little party, and this was an excuse to go get a bottle of Burgundy to bring over.  The town's hockey team had finally won the Stanley Cup, and they had dogs, cocker spaniels, and were friendly once you got to know them.  Avoidance.  So he gathered his courage and walked down the street with his courier bag slung over his shoulder, with a notebook, with a very old paperback copy of Cats Cradle, out in search of some form of meaning in this modern world of the city he had crashed down into without a clue, a Tralfamadoran, feeling, as soon as he had arrived, very very lost.

By now, as his guts felt a bit queasy, wanting to get rid of something, he could laugh at all the changed he'd seen.  He could, for instance, remember having a lemonade in a place you stepped down into when he first came to town, frustrated immediately with his professional prospects and the process of finding a job.  Since then, the place had been, after the little Mediterranean cafe, for a long time a lurid sex shop.  Tourists and people visiting the town for conventions, staying up the street, would stop and look down at the array of offered products, shampoo bottles of lubricating liquids, dildos, leather shorts and bustiers with studs, cat'o'nine whips, colorful condoms and that sort of thing all laid out on display there in the window just above street level.  Most recently it had fallen into a more lucrative business, that of doing people's fingernails, and people would go down in and have their nails done by teams of Thai people with a good eye for making money, at all hours.

So it was a relief, after sitting for a moment to catch his breath, briefly pulling out his notebook at the sidewalk cafe patio of the Starbucks there were long ago he had a habit of working so, so it was relief to go back, dump off his bags, take a shower to remove the grubby feeling, and go awkwardly over to the neighbors, were one would be able to forget himself in making conversation tying in to where people were from, which always seemed like a good topic.  Many tangential things could come out of talking to someone and finding out where they were from.  Oh, Detroit, yes, cool.   "Terry Sawchuck," he'd say, working in a little factoid, relieved, and generally interested and quite happy to get out of his own skin and all his wearisome issues.  Irresponsibility, a game of pretend.  But what else can you do sometimes, what else can you do, as your whole world of socioeconomic livelihood goes up in flames and you don't even know how to get out.

The party was so much fun, that after rose wine, crisp and grapefruity, tater tots that he thought for all he could tell might little bay scallops or something by their texture, and a bite of fried boneless chicken wing, and conversation that had nothing to do with his life or Tralfamador or anything else in particular, he left with a friendly smile, as any intergalactic being would, one who knows that all atomic structures are friendly, and relieved to find their mirror images as the crafty creator of the Universe and all things had managed to do in so many infinite and countless forms of variation, from stalks of bamboo to neighbors of Chinese ancestry and cocker spaniels, to people who could talk intelligently about politics, about, let's say, the crucial swing vote of the mush heads who would believe anything you told them, he returned to the apartment, put a spray of spot remover onto a spot on his tee shirt, took off his pants and went to bed, as it had all tired him out.

He was feeling very shy and nervous about everything, and this is stressful and he needed the rest, and felt to sleep immediately.

Yes, yes, all the people who feel they do not belong, there are many of them.  And it's a fair thing for them, considering that all the elements they are built of down to the deepest level of their atomic composition and all the things that make them tick are very strange and miraculous and things that, as far as any science truth can tell, originated, like everything else, with the Big Bang, and all the stellar events that came after that.  Each of us needed supernovas to happen--and they did, eventually--so that the building blocks of our bodies could be atomically forged and crafted just so.  The Buddhists know that there is an animate form of Carbon as well as an inanimate form of Carbon.  (Perhaps what it takes is a good talking to, for the animate form to arise from the stone form before you, thus the story of Lazarus, the story of "hey, just talk to people and it will all be okay," another form of the Golden Rule, which is itself a rule because we are both good and bad at it.)

So.  Why the darkness, the amateur hack of a science fiction writer wondered to himself as he rose after his initial Biblical rest, wondering to himself, now what the hell do I do.  The day had been very hot, and nighttime was a relief, no one could argue, and it was quiet, and there were a few laundry piles to consider anyway...

It is shocking and horrible to feel the loneliness that people must feel.  We know this better with age.  The blank terror of feeling being alone, that drives you, and certainly the business of making horror movies and the dramas of like things.  MacBeth doth murder sleep, Shakespeare knew, knowing himself, the terror, the need for some form of diversion...

But there are beautiful little things to take comfort in.  Bookshelves.  If we didn't have bookshelves, books would pile up all over the place, on dining room tables, counter tops, even on beds.  The Universe is created just so, and books are created just so, that we have a way of stacking them in a rather beautiful and friendly way.


The bursts of creativity that come from the human animal are rather wonderful, and worth trying out and experimenting personally with.  How did The Beatles come about?  Songs we all wanted to sing, and they were the ones who got together and did it.  They coalesced.  They became a planet, four kids from Liverpool.  "Rock and Dole," they called it, because they were living on the courtesy of the state, on a form of welfare, which was very helpful as they were getting their act together, John and Paul, living on the dole.


Zog, a character fleshed out by a Mr. Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., came to Earth with vital information as to how to save the planet and to cure cancer and other such things, but he got brained with a golf club when he tried to save people from a burning house.  And so on.  That's life on this planet for you.




Literary criticism became fiction, and fiction became literary criticism.  Fiction, and poetry, too, realized that this is what it had been all along.  The consciousness of the Universe looking back on itself.  Truly, the secret was, one didn't need, at least always, at least if there were very patient human readership, people who were kind enough to sense on a gut level that you'd been at it a long time, this trying-to-write business, for whatever reason, why green is green and blue is blue, and sort of deserved a small measure of being listened to...  The secret was that one didn't always need a fancy story line and the puppet shows of things happening in front of childlike eyes, nor a narrative...  Not to the extent we might have thought anyway.  What we needed was a cave, a rocky face to draw things on, and the writer could provide such a cave, so that then people could go into it and draw their own pictures, having the courage to go down into a cave and draw an animal, a magical one, a frightening one, a large one, a fast one, a mysterious one, a beautiful one, a one you could eat if you could bring one down.

Every day the mind changes and presents us with new things, moods, thoughts, the whole bit.

And this is why the soldier's walk home up the old path, Platonov's Potudon River, was an act worth writing down.  There was something going on in the soldier's walk.  The soldier's walk, and the act of recording it, was a form of literary reflection, of literary observation and critique, explanatory.



He woke, like we all do, in the middle of the night, about four in the morning.  It was still dark out.  It would grow to light outside in an hour or so, but still it was that pleasant depth of night and the moon, directly to the south, but not full was there in the backyard hiding behind a tree.  He had an urge to have a glass of wine, to feel calmer about things.   A little pinot noir on the rocks, with soda water, just to soothe. Addict of the glowing screen, his instincts were, not to look out upon a farm, a small gathering of livestock, but to bring his iPhone in front of his face there in bed with his head propped up on a pillow, and open the Facebook App, as it was called, and thereby a stream of information would come, and he was, like everyone else, completely addicted to it, and this addiction was changing the world and outmoding a lot of what he knew and relied upon.  Soon some idiot would invent a bar that showed up at your door, or something like that.  The restaurant would show up at a minute's beckon with poor people to cook and wait on you very politely, in whatever circumstance.  And elderly people, not so clever, would languish, left alone, until some form of guilt arose in their offspring, who would then look at their little lit screens and order up for them a robot to keep them company.

Yes, indeed, it was the best of times, it was the worst of times, and Jeff Bezos, the king of the new global economy was moving in, around the corner.