There are times when I come across articles that crush me with envy. I keep the tabs open for weeks, lovestruck, jealous, awed. As a failed (if stubborn) poet, I am always at the mercy of a good turn of phrase. Yes, yes, the subject is important, if you insist. Oh, but how the writer writes it! Therein lies the rapture. Currently I am inching through a Shaaban Roberts book because so many paragraphs leave me paralyzed, pondering how he folds Kiswahili- a distinctly wordy language- into such elegant. effing. simplicity. And then I weep, because my own Kiswahili will always be disgustingly infantile, dragging its broken self across people's ears like nails across a blackboard. Damn you, Shaaban Roberts! I was happy when I didn't know you...
All of which is to lead up to these two links- can't remember who I lifted them from, but thank you. Fair warning: they are both a little nuts, excessive, self-satisfied and arrogant with a liberal sprinkling of swearwords. Everything that you're not supposed to do as a "good" writer. The second one makes for excellent reading- and seriously, who doesn't want to know more about Scientologists? But the first one is magic. It's neither here, nor there. It goes, in fact, nowhere. It won't feed the hungry, and it won't make you a better person. Sometimes, that's exactly what the soul needs. What I would give for a magazine with literary pretensions in Dar es Salaam. This writing life...
You constantly revile me with your singular lack of vision. Be aware, there is an essential truth and beauty in all things. From the death throes of a speared gazelle to the damaged smile of a freeway homeless. But that does not mean that the invisibility of something implies its lack of being. Though simpleton babies foolishly believe the person before them vanishes when they cover their eyes during a hateful game of peek-a-boo, this is a fallacy. And so it is that the unseen dusty build up that accumulates behind the DVD shelves in the rumpus room exists also. This is unacceptable.
2. I joined the Church of Scientology in 1970, and by the end of the decade, I was at the top of my game. I was a full Lieutenant. Only fifty people in all of Scientology outranked me. I’d been First Mate of the Flagship; and a few years later, I was working directly with the Commodore [Hubbard], planning public relations strategies for Scientology worldwide. I managed an entire fucking continent for them. Then I crashed and burned on Southern Comfort and Coca-Cola, sex, junk food, and tranny porn. My job performance took a nosedive, and I was summarily removed from my post in middle management and demoted to sales, where, phoenix-like, I rose from my own ashes brighter and stronger than ever.
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