Shit Eating Grunts

Fellow Travellers,

So I haven't written a thing of my own in over four months. My skin is pasty, my mouth is dry, and I find that when I look down, the normally unembarrassing span of my torso has been transformed into something as strange and foreboding as a martian landscape. What's happened to me - more importantly, what's happened to us? And when it goes, does it go forever, or is there a way to get back what was once so important in your life?

A better man than I would have taken his ideas of departure and return from Greek myths, the New Testament, and the novels of Joseph Conrad. But for me, the formative influences - at least the ones I can pin down - are all either cinematic or musical. As I look at the things that have gone out of or come into my life, Walt Disney is my Edith Hamilton and Bruce Springsteen my Joseph Campbell. Everything dies, baby that's a fact. But maybe everything that dies someday comes back.

To the point: one thing both rock and roll and movies teach you is that the only way out of the desert is through it. Ezekiel ate shit - can you imagine that? The man actually ate shit. I wonder if he started with a little bit, just a little smidgen that stuck on the end of his spoon, tilting over like an old man falling asleep in his chair as Zeke stared and stared. Or did he just dive in, attacking that shit like it was his last meal. Relishing it, in other words. I'd like to know, and feel like it is both a canny elision and an unfortunate caesura in the Books as we know them. What does it feel like to be hungry?

I don't know what the fuck's going on. I don't want to trivialize the feeling of being cut off from creative sources by making it seem like simply one more topic for a blog post...but then why not, at this point? If the only way out really is through, then why not begin with the trivial?

What do you think? Are you out there?

Howl?