I Know

nothing but fear (literature)

I know nothing but fear and loneliness. I am going to see if I can write my way out of it. This is not to make money. I will need to generate enough drama to support a story line. I don’t have that drama. I’m a boring asswipe. Which is precisely why I have to write my way out of a miserable and awkward situation.

There’s a small me down there on earth, struggling with things. It is trying to tell me things. I can scarcely hear. I am down there, trying to create something interesting. It is very important to relax, in what is known as “your real condition,” a sort of sublime state. As long as I am close to that “real condition,” I tell ya, I will feel better. If I create my own drama I am risking going crazy. I know that.

“How can I get away from my dead-end life,” Mac asked one day.

“In Chicago…” said Mac, “I will not stay.” And So: he went away. He
had no life; he had no wife. He was all alone in a car, which is how he drove
west. A man can lose himself in the West — many have.

“All the way up to the western part of South Dakota I was fine” reports Mac. But the engine on that car gave out. One could not climb a hill. That car just gave up and I was in the lumber country where the Black Hills begin to start up and people earn a living cutting timber in those hills. For most, it was wealthy little resort snob spot. But there were some people who sold me the car they had and I drove on—Wyoming to follow immediately. From there, I lost touch with being from Chicago at all. I remember a hotel in Portland and a young man who sold me his laptop that he no longer wanted. It was my first laptop computer, I never had a problem with that one.

And then Mac was in a hotel. It was Prescott, Arizona; it was like he was a cowboy. Mac kept mostly to himself out west, just he did earlier in his life back home. Wherever that is. Everywhere he went to, he came back alone. It was a long time before Mac ventured back into a different part of the country. He was a Westerner for a good while. He turned his car (Dodge Caravan) back towards the east.

Immediately, Mac entered into a very exciting period. He used the library at the University of Indiana. He met the general editor of the university publisher, who publishes post-modernism books. They have published some great books. He was there in the eighties and nineties I suppose. Now was already around 2007. My economics views were fully mature. I stopped working out the theory; I was bored, more than anything else.

Frightened and alone.