Not sure why I do this, why I keep coming here to make words thinking they’re worlds or might be if rightly strung together. It’s like thinking if you throw shit at the wall long enough it’ll eventually make art as long as you learn the right size handfuls and angles and velocities and distances. And so you throw and throw and you make the shit art and some shit person buys it with their shit money and lots of other shit people think with their shit brains that the shit on your shit wall is worth a damn so you go and shit think so too.

Who would do that? Me, and maybe I shouldn’t. This is where I turn melodramatic and predictable and threaten to hang it up and leave it behind as a few-year phase of self-exploration and Everyone comes out of the woodwork and implores me to continue to keep the shoes on and keep walking or whatever tired metaphor ensues because I have a “gift” and who are we, humble servants of indefinite and narcissistic higher powers, to squander our gifts by putting them in derisive quotations. Ah, but I’m just talking again, just me and the wall and I know better but right now it fucking stinks in here.

Two rejections this week, same day, in fact, like they were colluding, both coming on a day I took off from the shit job I keep to keep making shit money till my shit dream of shit art ripens and freefalls from the tree in a gravitational pull of energy and activity before it hits the ground and rots in the grass, one with a kindly kind of note that can be summed up as saying “almost,” though with some thoughtful reasons why. That’s partly what brings me here, like this, now. Partly. Apparently my writing “meanders” (in a good way) and sometimes “wanders” too far (in a not so good one), though my “voice” is “strong” and “unforgettable.” That’s “nice.”

I don’t even remember what else is out there anymore, sliding down the wall—two chapbook contests and a mouse’s handful of short story/essay/poetry submissions and a backlogged log of possibles, I think, all listed out and tracked and marked with due dates and shit. And that one story I sent to the Paris Review and forgot to include the postage on the self-addressed return/rejection envelope they require so I guess I’ll never see that again. It’s a good story; some of you have read it.

And all the rest? Just blog posts in this no man’s land I can’t bring myself to drop forever by changing my password to something perfectly forgettable like this little divulgence here, oh and a hard drive full of incompletes with tremendous, terrible, frightful potential — history, in other words (in the pejorative sense, which is a shame) and the whole shebang has me wandering and wondering from where invention comes and how much it costs to get there and whether they sell monthly passes or annual and whether I have the literary-world security clearance to be heard and the alienable right to be seen and the actual gift to actually bla bla bla bla in a voice so strong and unforgettable it actually matters and means but here I am again ostending my insecurities.

Ok, there, that feels better. I needed to tell the truth, even if it’s false. If.