Hello, loyal and seemingly perpetually attractive reader.  It has been, as the kids would say, a minute.  I’ve been here, and I’ve certainly not forgotten about you.  I’ve just been going through what I guess is best called a period of intense growth.  Personally, professionally, psychologically…all of it.  Which was prefaced with a couple years’ worth of tectonic existential freakouts.  It’s been weird as hell, and could probably only be accurately described in very Jungian language, which would make it sound like I had slewn a dragon or escaped the Matrix.  Which I haven’t.  But I have seen that there is a Matrix to escape and that all dragons have fatal vulnerabilities.  In my quest to figure myself out, I unwittingly pierced the veil and ended up also figuring out quite a bit about others and the Nature of Things.  Suffice it to say, I have answered all the questions that needed answering.  Jesus…see?  This is already meandering into the metaphysical.  I think I’m supposed to be talking about writing.

Rewind to the previous century, when I started Writing (with a capital W…as both performance art and blood sport), I honestly thought I was prepared for anything.  Rejection, failure, starvation, depression, isolation, insanity…I had prepared for all of it (insomuch as someone can be said to prepare for that sort of thing without having actually experienced any of it).  Anyway, it all happened, some of it hit harder than some of the rest, and I managed, one way or another, to get through it.

But a couple of decades ago, very slowly, like the frog in the slowly heating pot, I started feeling increasingly separated from American culture.  When the divorce finally happened, it happened  so quickly, I was left blindsided: one minute, I was tossing back cocktails with the people who make the culture at the top of some high-rise on the Avenue of Americas and taking meetings with producers at Universal Studios, and maybe two years later being completely and acrimoniously split from the entire rotten culture, sitting behind locked doors with both middle fingers raised.  Which was awkward as some sort of artist, but still I thought somehow sustainable.

Pero no.  Over the course of the last 5-10 years, Americans and their insidious culture have changed for the unacceptably stupid and absurd, and now I’m left facing a bunch of challenges I honestly never saw coming.  This has left me in a very awkward position vis-à-vis my agenda and overall plan as a writer.

Continued tomorrow.

N.P.: “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” – 3TEETH