Don't take it personal.

If you don't want to kill anything,
don't start a garden.

You write for money or love. Nothing
worthwhile was ever written for money
nor ever will be. If you don't think so,
you write for money. Or fame, same thing,
cuz if you were famous & poor, it wouldn't
be enough. Write for love, you'll never go
wrong, even if you end up a poor nobody, though
you may go mad unless you're careful.

The only part of Life of Pi I liked
was the island where he was washed up
with the tiger & the ice plant phantasmagoria
& masses of tame meerkats that climbed up
the tree and slept all over the guy
to evade the toxic boiling fish-eating water.

"The cell phone is the devil's masterpiece."
--Bill Cleere

"They name roads after a lot of people."
--Bob Dylan

I read a book about Scientology & it freed me up
to think how naive, evil & insane people can be.
It freed me up in the sense that it makes my
own uncertainties feel like at least they're
mine, not somebody else's. Uncertainties
can be like a bobbing lake under an air mattress
I'm floating around in the sunshine on. Imagine
paying a madman to take you apart & nail the
pieces to his castle walls. It takes a lot of
work to be free enough to relax & make friends
with yourself, your mind, your way, your shadow.

Mystical is normal.

I read not for the thoughts somebody else has written
but for the thoughts I get in response to their thoughts.
Ideas & images & rolling connections. I don't trust
any writer, right off the bat. Why
should I? Before I trust him I've got to know that
he respects himself, respects me, loves humankind, has
an open heart, or if closed at least honest about that.
Isn't insane, violent for fun, infantile, contemptuous, trying
to shock me, waste my time. He or she's gotta know themself,
why they're writing in the first place. Then I'll trust
them & we can have a nice quiet little conversation as I read.

He paced like a man who had had a vision.