Two Beats Down

 “‘Please to be restful.  It is only a few crazies who have from the crazy place outbroken.’” - pg 38

I have finally escaped from the dysfunctional, severely violent and graphic, drug fueled ramblings of Burroughs’ homo-erotic mind vomit.  Naked Lunch was like reading an aneurysm through the stretched rubber of a used condom.  Necessary read, yes, if only so I can truly say go fuck yourself, you fucking waste-of-life, trust fund baby, and fuck you, society of mindless sheep who think shit is brilliant because you can’t think for yourselves and have anything resembling rational thought process. 

 The ONLY purpose this work serves is to either keep anyone with half a brain from doing drugs, or to fuel the negative deviance of a criminal mind that throws their potentially beautiful life away to be high and oblivious all the time, until the hazy fog of life becomes the death that never seems to come too soon.  Too brutal?  Seriously?  If I were to write anything even resembling this I would be more likely to find myself in prison than celebrated, which brings up the luxury of having famous friends and coming from money, again.  I am seriously starting to lose interest in accomplishing anything, especially if the worse that it is in reality, the more it is celebrated for being “different.”  This entire generation of writers completely embodies the boredom with beautiful things, and defines our current obsession with different, which doesn’t really exist.

 The upside to this, for me, was that it fueled a chapter I’ve been putting off on my own drug addiction twenty years ago.  Now I understand that it not only doesn’t need to make sense, but the more incoherent it is the better.  I’m just not sure if my rational mind will allow me to do even simple things like throwing grammar out the window and not forming competent sentences.  Though I am curious what kind of response I would get if I went on a rant about sucking some guys dick, then hanging him, snapping his neck, and fucking his final erection while he sprayed diarrhea all over the wall.  I don’t imagine it would be great, but I have also never been that fucked up of a deviant to have any kind of secret fantasies like that.

Gauging by the reception his work got, I imagine there is a much bigger problem with the human condition, bubbling and festering beneath the plastic, fake-smile surface of a seriously fucked species.  I always mentioned that we were a deviant species, based on my own experience and observation, but this is a whole new level of fucked up.  

“May all your troubles be little ones - said one pedophile to another.”

What?

Is that entertaining?  Did I need to read that?  Is the world a better place with minds like this wandering around?  

*breathe*

I can’t write about my life right now, even though epic things are happening, and I feel significantly betrayed, so I’ll just hide behind what I’m forcing myself to read, even though I clearly don’t want to read it.  I found myself binge reading Burroughs, not because I enjoyed it, but because I just wanted it to stop.

 There was one chapter in the additional writing that was worth a read (The restored text, edited by James Grauerholz and Barry Miles), in which a sober Burroughs talked candidly about addiction, and fumbles a little in trying to excuse some of the images with which he told his story.  That had some redeeming qualities, but overall, I don’t think I need to go on about how I really felt.  I mean, honestly, it took nine years to do this?  Anyone with half the addiction and half the creative obsession could write something better.  Fucking Beats.  I hope you died choking on your incoherent, deeper meaning that only makes sense to you and your idiotic excuses.

But…

But….

Shut the fuck up.  Now I’m on to the Kerouac that I don’t want to read because everyone won’t shut up about how brilliant it was.  This isn’t the edited down edition that was published in ’57, but the original scroll, so… it’s all one rambling paragraph.  This specific edition starts with over 100 pages of introduction, and has already proven to be disappointing.  Recently I read an article online in which Kerouac’s girlfriend at the time confessed that this work was not written in three weeks of a “sustained burst of creative energy,” like Kerouac advertised, but was meticulously structured, paragraph by paragraph, for years, which considerably reduces the creative legitimacy of the work.

 Even in this first introduction by Howard Cunnell, it is confessed that it was no secret amongst his creative piers that Kerouac had been working on this since ’48, if not ’47, before he wrote his first book, and went through many drafts that went in many different directions, with various different narrators from many different nationalities and voices.  He may have written A draft in 1951, in which he was writing a story that he was already so familiar with that it was easy to pound out in three weeks, but that was not the first or final draft by any means.  Yet, the cover of this book references this original scroll and “the legendary first draft (1951),” and the cover flap advertises mentioned sustained burst of creative energy, in this “uncut” version, that had already been cut to fucking confetti of literary lies and bullshit.  The cover of this book completely contradicts what the first twenty pages explain.

I’m sure it’s a fine book, it certainly can’t be worse than Howl or Naked Lunch, but can we start focusing on the reality of all of this: none of these “brilliant” writers were that brilliant, nor were they even writers, arguably; they were mostly trust fund babies who had the luxury of knowing people of influence and took advantage of the opportunities that were handed to them like the rest of us are handed bills and rent deadlines.  

Maybe you can sense my frustration with the current state of my life by what I have to say about a couple guys that were celebrated in their time, but I don’t have the energy to explain because I’ve got to emotionally prepare myself to read a fucking 300 fucking page fucking paragraph.  

Oh my.

How do I really feel?