I have always hated the process of writing. Twisting my head 360 degrees and spitting out pea soup is so much simpler an act than plowing into the thought process of producing one paragraph that seamlessly leads into the next. I just don't process thought that way. Creative passages lurch and jerk away from me, perambulating like some befuddled drunk muttering in sotto voce, "I'd rather be lost in the Gobi Desert than be part of this mess."
Despite my meandering prose and run-on sentences, no one ever confused me with Jack Kerouac -- unless we're talking about Garness Kerouac, the petty sneak thief I knew in Mad City years ago.
I remember at Madison Central High School, a teacher, upon reading one of my essays when I was in 10th grade, stuck her nose so close to my eyes that my lashes cleaned off the last snack she'd eaten in the teacher's lounge. What a caustic dog! She asked whether English was my second language. I told her it would be once I mastered stick figure cave painting.
For me to compose even my John Hancock on a worthless check, I go "method noir," turning as paranoid as a bag of snakes, as alcoholic as a beat poet, and as angry as a vegan at a Coney Island eat-a-thon.
I start smoking around the clock and even next to the clock. I prefer the cheap, unfiltered cancer sticks that make your eyes water and your mouth taste like twice-burnt flesh, though two-bit bargain basement stogies found burning on top of dumpster piles do just fine. I like second-hand smoke from hand-me-down cigars.I punch myself in the kisser and kick myself in the groin. I cut myself shaving, yet leave a two-day stubble growth to assert my manhood. I toss my apartment looking for a bottle of three dollar gin to start a four day lost weekend. Energy- saving bulbs are tossed out the window, replaced with flickering neon lights.
An apartment ain't no damn good for "method noir" unless asbestos fibers flake downwards from the ceiling into your day-old, cigarette-filled coffee mugs, bought years before on the boardwalk when you were the captive young swain of some beat up old madame. I go out and steal this lung angina from condemned buildings around town.
I scrap away two layers of insulation, making my walls so thin the silhouettes of those next door neighbors performing nastiness aerobics on each other displace the need to download porn. I go out and hire actors to simulate whatever I just said.
I make additional changes to the mise en scène: A toilet functioning both as a bath tub and a dishwasher comes straight from a green web site called "Why Waste Water Fool?"
I collect dirty dishes from around the neighborhood and pile them sky high in the sink, then call in some favors and have a pest service deliver cockroach carcasses to throw around in a feng shui manner. For good measure, I cut up my "euro-trash furniture" to give the sense that either a drug cartel or the DEA has been rifling through my place looking for some blow.
I play the low cool bass of Charlie Mingus and rumble it against the wet cobblestone streets of that mean hydra the paparazzi call the City of Angels. I purchase both the rain and construct the cobble stoned streets. My back hurts; I now owe the mob plenty for they control both the rain and construction materials. And my last back alley crap game lost me my rent.
I stare out from cracked, shadeless windows and wait for the guns I've place strategically around the neighborhood to find owners that believe people do kill, not the Mach 10's in their sweaty hands. I hear a boisterous buxom blond knocking on my door, though any female over the age of 18 who doesn't outweigh me will do just as well. I get my babes from a new LA web site called "Los Angeles: Down, Dirty, Cheap and Free to be You and Me."
Now I'm ready to dance my fingers over my Underwood and compose sentences that don't resemble a schizophrenic's notepad. The end result: Noir OBGYN: Fingers of Fury.
So that's why this took so long. Oh that and I herniated a disc and found salvation in my cats trying to bury me as waste material in their litter boxes. According to this classy noir video I also need a sexy accent to go along with my stubble.
