YOU CALL YOURSELF A WRITER? You think you’re cutting edge, with your bourgeois graduate degree in avant-garde fiction, with your seven manuscripts you’ve had work-shopped three times each at Iowa and Naropa? You think you’re down with the cause, so into your abstract references to sex, drugs and rock and roll? Well give it up you shit faced cock master. Mail it in poseur, ‘cause I’m the Bukowski of the Internet.
Yeah that’s right. My institutions of higher learning are card rooms, sports books, dive bars that specialize in desperate, older punk rock chicks and the emergency room at County. Do those credentials show up anywhere in your MA/MFA/PH fucking D from the creative writing programs at USC or Stanford or wherever? Down at the courthouse they call me “Mister.”
There isn’t a cheap ass/sorry ass web periodical or blog that hasn’t posted my hard-edged fiction or too real for real life poems…man. You name it: Three River Journal, 2 AM, Long Smoke Quarterly, High Plains Review, Fraction, Tattler’s Tower, Thugs Rhetoric, The Eclipse, Fourth Muse, Drunken Schooner, Black Paint Warrior, Exquisite Quartz, Purple Sun Review, Muse Apprentice Corps, Fetus In My Latte, Small Particulate Notebook, 420 Epic, Oyster Girl, Blue Beret, Cinco de Mayo Trope, Maxima, Eleven Steers for Eleven Queers, Poetry Expressway, Can’t I Get My Goddamn Fucking Ball Back, Insured Boys, Opiate…I’ve done them all bitch. Web Del Sol is my own personal brothel. Their titles are like notches carved in my bedpost.
Seriously, I’ve lost more prose to the dead, shimmering margins of cyberspace than you’ve got stacked up in that box of aborted half stories and 3 dozen college journals sitting in the closet of your “writer’s den.” Google my name (I do every day) and you’ll come up with nearly a few thousand hits, the most for a hard-core street writer without a major published novel, more than some authors with major published novels.
Go ahead: laugh. You watch me babe. In a few years, you’ll be saying “oh yeah, I know that guy, he was always real super-talented and we’re still really good friends.” Fuck you in advance, asshole. This is my strategy. This is my ride and no one else gets to come along. This is how a real writer has to get it done, getting their shit out there for the desperate few that actually give a flying fuck about real literature.
Why don’t I prove it, you ask? Why don’t I go hardcopy? ‘Cause I’m too hard for hardcopy, man. I’m too hard for McSwooney’s and Zoetrip, those pansy ass bourgeois pretenders…I’m the Colonel Nathan R. Jessup of online lit: They can’t handle my truth. Those two pieces of fine trim at Neon Caboose begged me to publish with their limp ass rag, but after I tag teamed them in front of their yuppie husbands they saw my light. They knew I was too good for their bagel and coffee jerk off scene. I hated Seattle anyway; nothing but cafes, bookstores and music shops. Happiness was seein’ that loser town in my rear view mirror.
Nah, only the net is able to contain all the sordid sex and drugs that make up the fabric of my life, brother. That’s because drugs and sex are what the people want. And I’m a poet of the people. It is from the masses, that I take my charge.
Just like Hank, I submit three times a day, relentless, everything. Buk may have been the king of the small ‘zines, but I’m gonna be king of the e-zines. I already am, but when I get famous, that’s what I’ll be famous for. I don’t have time to start my own e-zine and propagate my work through that channel. I’m a real writer. Real writers write. They don’t publish. They don’t translate. They don’t critique some obscure shit no one outside the dusty corner of an academic library’s poetry section will ever read. I have to win out babe. I have to be smarter and leaner than all the other prose poetry slash flash micro-fiction pretending sons of bitches.
For each submission I write three original pieces. That’s right you lazy piece of shit: nine poems per day, every day. Sixty-three poems per week. Three thousand, two hundred and seventy six poems a year. And that’s in addition to the novels, screenplays and essays I’m continuously writing. Even the collective ghostwriters for L. Ron Hubbard are all a bunch of pussies compared to me, collectively speaking no less. You think this is some easy, air-conditioned hobby you get to indulge in to feel the touch of the immortal? Goddamn your soul you desperate bastards. You have to work for that touch. At least sweat, if not blood, and after enough of the former, believe me, you’ll prefer the latter.
And just because you don’t see my name everywhere you look doesn’t mean I’m not there. I write under thirteen pseudonyms, in seven different genres, from Sci-Fi to Horror to counter-culture to political revolutionary to free e-porn novels. I’m everywhere reader, a regular literary guerilla, a cyber insurgent representing a larger, deeper cause, taking on the pathetic, irrelevant establishment in my way man.
One of these days, I’m gonna get me my own screenplay based loosely on all the tragic fucking romance of my life, and then you’re all gonna be sorry. Sorry for the way you treated me. Sorry for the way you dismissed me. I’m not even saying you shouldn’t have. I’m just saying life’s not fair, and I don’t see anything stopping me from getting even when my day comes. Don’t you try and tell me you don’t have it coming you miserable motherfuck.
I’m going to throw huge parties that you won’t be invited to. After I’m done doing Eight Balls with Denis Johnson, Chuck Palahniuk and Jimmy Frey, I’ll have my choice of gorgeous fiction groupies to pick from off my front lawn, in between the critics and reviewers camped out among them clamoring for interviews. Naturally I’ll select only the youngest, most beautiful girls to have group sex with, preferably from Sweden, while you piss and moan about how it wasn’t fair. Don’t talk to me about fair. In another life, I would have been Sinatra. I should have been Sinatra…or Hemingway…or Faulkner.
Shut up. Don’t look at me like that.
Yeah, that’s right. I scare me too. I have to. I’m the Bukowski of the Internet.
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