Ishmael Gradsdovic Papers, part sixty-five


23 June 1998

Yeah; S----'s in the catbird seat right now.— T----'s roomates think he's the bomb and U----'s an unstable cad. U---- is unstable and would be hella frustrating to be lovers with but, feh, you know and I know that T---- isn't in that one because she thought it'd be easy. U----'s U---- and nobody else is and you take the good with the bad or you don't take it at all and besides he's hung like a horse.

Henry Darger escaped from an asylum at age 16 where he'd been admitted for masturbation (which was, at the beginning of this century in America, not just a symptom but a mental illness all its own). He spent the rest of his life writing and illustrating "The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinnean War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion" the single-spaced, typewritten, unfinished manuscript to which ran to more than 15,000 pages at Darger's death.

My toothpaste claims it will get my teeth "up to five shades whiter." What does this mean? What is a 'shade' of tooth color? If there is no such thing, and I think there is not, why soften the bullshit with 'up to?' If the product's claim is so patently bogus, why did I buy it? If it is so unlikely to have any genuine value based on its empty claims, why are my teeth whiter?

Brother Jed, Henry Darger, Leon Czolgolsz, George Psalmanazar - my heroes are dangerously mad or furiously sane men who swim at a right angle to the tao stream - somehow from the examples of these tortured examples of human lives I have to counterfeit my life skills.

I walk around and whereever I look I see words and those words are instantly spoken aloud in my brain as if there were someone close by - if I myself were close by, since it is my voice - whispering to me. Stop, Do Not, Warning, New, Got Milk? My world is inhabited by voices, that can be said about anyone of my species at any time since we left the trees. But the voices of my generation use the words of schoolbooks, television, signs and contracts, we have no mothers, we've never tasted milk, we taste the alternating current and our eyes flicker at sixty hertz.

The spaceship hovers over Earth and cyclone drags every girder and nickle into its grid, sucks the filtered oceans into its hold and spits the fish onto the farmland, reflects the sunlight onto the endless acres of tall corn and the five hundred lost apache with machetes trying to find their way to the edge, televises the George Lucas grandeur and beams it back live and instantaneously to the off shift of four manning the treadmills fattened with corn syrup trying to lose weight keeping the Arab kings from buying the Washington Monument.

The U.S. is fighting the Vietnam War again on television and this time we're paying them to lose and their per-capita income, their female literacy rate, and their average life expectancies are rising with every increase in the body count. In America even a criminal gets a fair trial, even a slave can write a letter to Congress, even an artist who dies in poverty can be on a postage stamp. In America no complaint is really justified there is a bathroom in every restaurant. The best housing are on the plantations with the best views the prettiest percent of nature has already been saved and framed nearby.

And the best weed is in California.



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