01/23/01

I just don’t know what to say when it comes to Percy’s artistic career. I know he's got a lot of artist friends, but it's not like that stuff just rubs off on you from other people. He’s a fine writer when it comes to history and what-have you, but just as soon as it comes to creative writing, it’s just not there for him despite all his ambition. It was Percy himself who explained that creative writing comes from the right side of your brain and all the other stuff comes from your left brain. That’s why novelists can’t always do journalism so well, and why journalist don’t necessarily make good novelists. He did a fine job too laying that all out for me, ‘course what he was describing was factual material, and the factual stuff is a breeze for him. You see someone work for years on something that monstrously huge, you just can’t go and say, your novel sucks Percy. You shouldn’t have bothered. When Percy asks me what I think of the manuscript, I just say, what bit I’ve read so far seems just like James Joyce. Of course I haven’t read more than 15 pages of James Joyce in my entire life. But then I’ll add: You do know, Percy, that Nicholas Sparks sells a lot more books than James Joyce these days. Maybe you could work on a more slender follow up.

Sparks? Percy responds, all mortified and indignant and stuff, like Squidward, Are you kidding me?

My wife drags me out to every one of those sappy movies based on sappy novels. The worst part of all is that they always turn out to be written by fucking men! I mean, you’re telling me a person with testicles wrote Steel Magnolias?

Then there was that Bridges of Madison County ordeal. That was some sick dude’s handiwork. Clint Eastwood: what body-snatching Thetan did you succumb to? Then Nicholas Sparks came along. Sometimes I feel like slitting my wrists in the theater and letting them bleed dry into my mega-sized bucket of popcorn. Of course Phebe can never get enough of that horse shit.

I told Percy about this idea I had for a movie called, The Dutch Barns of the Hudson Valley. I told him it’s about this photographer for National Gigolographic Magazine who travels around upstate New York photographing Dutch barns and porking lonely inhabitants of the rural landscape. Percy ran off and told his freaky filmmaker pal--- Francois ---about the spoof, and then Francois is at my door with Percy soon afterward looking to buy the fucking idea from me for a short film.

I tell him, you can have the idea. I don’t want a dime of money from anyone who’d pay to see anything like that anyway. Francois had me sign a waiver so he could use the idea---and by damn if he didn’t!

The best time I ever had at the movies with Phebe was when we went to see American Beauty when it was first out, must have been about a year or two ago. She thought from the title it was going to be some kind of romance, so she was pretty disappointed with what she found. I’m ashamed to admit I emulated Kevin Spacey’s dinner plate thrown into the wall scene with the turkey platter this past Thanksgiving dinner. I think the lath had to have cracked from the blow. Needless to say, I began living here in this cold fucking trailer shortly thereafter.

Like I joke with Swami Hard Salami: At least I never got the Oedipus complex screwed up by killing my mother and having sex with my father.