The Wrath of Kon

Dispatches, thoughts, and miscellanea from writer Jon Konrath

  • My new book, Thunderbird, is now available

    Over the next few months, I chipped away at The Perkins Declaration: a 1400-page, ten-part handwritten epic that told the secrets of a military tribunal executing a group of Pakistani filmmakers who were shooting a DeLorean biopic movie in rural Iowa before getting nailed by the Department of Agriculture on charges of aggravated sodomy and interstate commerce fraud. It was a love story, sort of.

    I’m proud to announce that my ninth book, Thunderbird, is now available. It’s a 26-story collection of short stories and flash that blends Kafkaesque insanity, paranoia, nightmare surrealism, and scatological dystopia. It’s got FDA drone strikes against weight-loss clinics, amputee porn, a celebrity kickboxing match between Yo Yo Ma and Manuel Noriega, and hobby shop exorcisms.  It takes place in Jeff Spicoli-themed restaurants, indian casino abortion clinics, and the bizarre landscapes of extreme heavy metal album covers.  It’s filled with insane humor and nonstop non sequitur references to pop culture, medical technology, military machinery, and GG Allin albums.

    If you’re a fan of plot-driven detective stories with relatable characters and realistic, believable scenarios, you will not like this book.  This is experimental, demented, obscene, and a lot of fun.  I enjoyed writing it, and I hope you enjoy reading it.

    Check it:

    Thanks in advance to everyone who helped me with this, especially Ray Miller for his help on the cover, and John Sheppard for all of his various editorial advice.  Please, check the book out, and help me spread the word!

     

  • Why I Write

    So the next book, which is titled Thunderbird, is done and moving through the steps in publishing.  The cover is ironed out, the interior is done, and the kindle version is being tested and tweaked.  It’s entering the phases of waiting on robots and meatgrinders to finish churning on what I gave them so I can approve the output and push it live, or make changes and wait another 12-296 hours for things to get stuck in a queue.  But, all of that’s good, and aside from all of the publicity stuff on the horizon I don’t want to deal with, this lets me shift my mind back to writing, and to the next book.

    The next book – that’s always a tough one.  Each time I finish the current book, I do a post-mortem and try to figure out what went right and what went wrong, so I can figure out what should be next.  I don’t write genre fiction, so it’s not a matter of saying “what crazy adventure or sinister villain is Dirk Johnson, Vampire Gunslinger going to get into next time?” And I’ve given up on the modernist semi-autobiography stuff, so I’m not looking at a specific era of my life to strip-mine for ideas.  It’s usually a matter of thinking about form, and what container will be used to pour my ideas into to shape them into the linear thing we call a book.  And that’s always hard.

    I don’t like traditional story structure.  I know you’re supposed to use it, and every self-publishing site talks about how it’s required for you to follow some plot arc of rising and falling action and blah blah blah.  If I was trying to write the next Wool, I would pay attention to that stuff.  But I’m not.  And you shouldn’t.  If you want to make white bread because being in Kroger is important to you, then by all means, make white bread.  But that’s not why I write.

    I recently finished reading the JG Ballard Conversations book by the fine folks over at Re/Search, and there was an answer JGB gave during a Q/A for a book tour that really grabbed me.  It’s this:

    “I’ve always assumed that for the imaginative writer, the exercise of the imagination is a sort of necessary part of the way the central nervous system functions.  This separates the imaginative writer from the realistic, naturalistic writer in a very important sense. […] It seems as if the imaginative writer’s nervous system needs to run a continuous series of updates on the perception of reality.  And just sort of living isn’t enough — one feels one needs to remake reality in order for it to be meaningful.

    This.  This. This. This.

    I started writing in 1993.  I mean, I always wrote, but that’s the point where I got a notebook and a pen and decided I was going to stop trying to play bass guitar and stop trying to write video games and stop trying to… whatever the hell I was trying to do twenty years ago, and really try to dedicate myself to getting the thoughts out of my fucked up head and onto paper.  I was chronically depressed, didn’t know who I was or what I was doing, but had this idea that I needed to process what was going on in my mind, and going to group therapy or trying to date the right person or take the right meds was not going to do it.  I didn’t know if I was going to write science fiction or romance or journalism or kid’s books; I didn’t think about money or career or the publishing game or becoming famous or rich or any of that.  I just knew I needed to write.

    And what happened is that I became addicted to writing.  I did it every day, at first forcing myself, but then turning to it as a way to process my feelings, and exercise my imagination.  I didn’t do it as a form of work or craft, but as a method of therapy, and expression.  I did write some of that modernist creative nonfiction stuff about my life, with mixed success, but it wasn’t until I started exploring the fringes of experimentalism, when I started reading guys like Mark Leyner and Raymond Federman, that I found ways to transfer my subconscious onto a page in a way that worked.  And when I successfully do that, I think it not only produces a product that’s different than other stuff out there, but it makes me feel more complete as a human being, probably in the same way that building a boat out of raw lumber helps someone find themselves.  It’s very much a “journey not the destination” thing, but completing these projects and moving on to the next one helps me benchmark my progress.

    On the days I can belt out a solid thousand or two words that works, I feel great.  On days when stupid appointments and unplanned emergencies eat up my time and prevent me from getting to the computer, I feel like total shit.  I’ve tried taking time off between books, time to go wander the town or just play bass and fuck off with video games, and I can’t do it.  I know it’s supposed to be helpful with writer’s block, and I do get crippling writer’s block, especially right after projects, but taking time away like that is like when you are forced to wake up every hour or so, and you never enter REM sleep and give your brain that time to heal or regenerate or process or whatever the hell REM sleep is supposed to do.  I feel like something in my subconscious is lethally gone, and I can’t sit still.  Even if I have no idea what I am going to write, I have to write.  Even if nothing is going on in life except 8 hours of work, 8 hours of sleep, a couple hours of dumb TV, and a few hours of showering, shitting, shaving, and cleaning up cat puke or whatever, I still need to find something to write about.

    I don’t write to sell books.  I don’t write to further my literary career or hob-nob to a bigger publisher or better bragging rights or a more prestigious magazine to pick up my stories.  I hope some of you do check out my writing and maybe it entertains you.  But if this was a Twilight Zone episode where I was asleep in a bank vault during a nuclear war and the only one alive, the first thing I’d do (after breaking into a LensCrafters and making 20 backup pairs of glasses) would be to find a pen and a notebook and keep writing.  I don’t write to sell.  I don’t write to feed a publishing machine.  I write because I write.

  • Before the chop, noise labels

    I just finished reading the new Henry Rollins book, Before the Chop, which is a collection of his LA Weekly articles from the last couple of years, in their longer, unedited form.  Previously, Rollins would write in his journals all year about his travels and whatnot, and then at the end of each year, dump them into a book.  I liked this format, and was hoping he’d continue to do that, but it’s also good to get the regular dispatches as they happen.  The writing is a bit different between the two, and he spends more time talking about his music collection and infatuations in the column.  This is bad news as a recovering collector, because it’s hard to get through reading this book without spending at least $500 on new CDs.

    One of the things that he talked about a few times that really interested me was the concept of Noise, and microlabels that support this genre.  I don’t know the history of noise as a musical genre, and I’m sure there are a million different ways to approach it.  I guess I’m most familiar with the more musically-based grindcore-derived stuff like Old Lady Drivers, and I’m sure to the non-metal fan, any grindcore is considered noise.  What Rollins was talking about though was the post-industrial stuff that came from labels like American Tapes.  For a good example, go to http://www.wolfeyes.net and listen to the videos there.

    American Tapes is now apparently done releasing stuff, but they put out a thousand titles over a dozen or so years.  Every title had strange artwork, and was on bizarre formats.  Boxed sets of cassette tapes, CD-Rs sharpied up with artwork, lathe-cut vinyl, freaky-colored 7″ records – they did a lot of weird stuff, all in limited editions, all carped-bombed out at a rate in which even a frenzied collector could not keep up with.  Their site (http://americantapes.us) still has stuff for sale, along with sound samples and pictures of releases and flyers.  Some of their stuff is pure art – miniature sculptures made with glued-on junk and spray paint that just happens to have a music delivery device of some sort wrapped inside of it.

    This stuff amazes me.  I mean, I love zines and chapbooks and weird-sized booklets and anything like that.  Even if the writing sucks, tell me your half-digest gold-foil-wrapped broadside is letterpress printed and limited edition, and I’ll paypal you money as fast as I can open the web site.  I love collecting stuff like that, and to see someone who has done a thousand releases like that only makes me feel like a slouch for writing one or two books a year.

    I wish I knew how to draw enough to do something like this.  I’ve been looking for some way of putting out cool little books like this, and spend too much time on eBay looking for a printing press, not that I’d know how to use it or have room to keep it.  I want to learn a lot more about design and find some way to crank stuff out like this, but it’s more of a distant dream, because even writing the books that I write takes a lot of time and effort.

    I need to research this more, and find more places doing this sort of thing.  God damn you, Rollins.  This is going to be a huge cash outlay.  It’s bad enough a bunch of these albums are on iTunes and can be purchased with the click of a button.

     

  • All of the stuff currently on my desk, a list with little to no commentary

    This is a list of all of the stuff on my desk.  Note that I don’t always write fiction-type stuff at my desk, because I work all day there, and it usually works out better when I write sitting on the couch in the living room, with actual sunlight and windows and whatnot.

    • Macbook Pro, Lenovo Thinkpad T410 – personal and work machines, respectively.  They both sit on top of each other, the Mac on the top, and run in clamshell 100% of the time, feeding into a KVM switch.
    • USB hub – connected to the Mac.  It usually has an extension cord plugged into it for when my Zoom B3 is sitting on the desk and I’m playing the bass.  It also has a FitBit charging cradle plugged into it.
    • WikiReader portable wikipedia offline reader thing I was talking about the other day, and its manual.
    • A flexible cable tie that I use to hang onto all of the disconnected cords from the Mac when I take it elsewhere, so I don’t spend 45 minutes trying to dig them up again after they fall behind the desk every goddamn time I disconnect the computer.
    • The Mac remote that came with my last MacBook, which still works for the new one, because at some point, Apple stopped including them, which is a damn shame.
    • A printout of a McKinsey report on disruptive technologies which is mostly bullshit about automated cars that S printed out for me and I feel like I should read, but after skimming it, I thought it was mostly buzzwords.
    • A pair of M-Audio studio monitors.
    • A Toshiba 1.5Tb portable USB hard drive.
    • A bunch of different smart vitamins that I never take, because I’m not smart enough to remember.  They currently include L-Theanine, Ginkgo Biloba, and Huperzine A.
    • A set of nose filters, which you are supposed to put in your nostrils and filter out air to prevent allergies.  They mostly work, but are really annoying and they push out your nostrils and make you look like a pig-alien from that episode of The Twilight Zone where everyone was horribly ugly, and the really hot chick couldn’t get surgery to look like them.
    • Someone’s address clipped off of the corner of an envelope.
    • My iPad on a stand that’s actually a wire cookbook holder, but only cost $4.
    • A bunch of Coke reward codes torn off of cases of Coke Zero.  I collect them, but I’m really lazy about entering them, so they accumulate.
    • The iPad to USB camera connector adapter.
    • A pair of foam earplugs, which always remind me of when I worked in a factory and had to wear them constantly.
    • A stack of post it notes, in the following colors: pink, yellow, pink, a white one from Samsung for some “Change and Innovation” bullshit program that nobody paid any attention to, pink, purple, yellow.
    • A bunch of cashed checks and the payment coupon booklet for my HOA.
    • A hexagon-shaped pencil holder with about a dozen and a half pens, a Palm Pilot stylus, a couple of Ikea golf pencils, and a sword letter opener with the handle broken off.
    • A half-empty bottle of Purell hand sanitizer, refreshing aloe flavor.
    • A Verilux table lamp.
    • A goLite M2 full-spectrum light.
    • A Kensington trackball.
    • An Apple Magic Trackpad.
    • A Kinesis Advantage keyboard.
    • A Guitar Center receipt.
    • A cloth napkin.
    • A copy of “Slap Bass: The Ultimate Guide” by Ed Friedland, on DVD.
    • These stupid Virgin Mobile prepaid phone cards, which I cannot get rid of.  (If you use Virgin Mobile prepaid, please email me and I will sell them at a loss.)
    • A pad of paper.
    • A stack of received postcards.
    • The instruction manual to a Meteor USB Mic.
    • The medication guide for Zolpidem tablets, which I do not take, but which I found amusing, because it says “After taking zolpidem, you may get out of bed while not being fully awake and do an activity that you do not know you are doing.”  The activities listed include driving a car and having sex.

    I also have a monitor and a webcam, but they are not really on my desk; they’re mounted to a stand that is mounted to the back of my desk.

  • Sleeping wall of remorse

    I always hate dealing with the postpartum depression that follows writing a book.  I’m finding it’s even worse when I don’t immediately publish the book and get it out of my hair. I’m currently waiting for someone else to go through it, and I want to just rip it off like a band-aid on a hairy arm and be done with it, move on to the next thing.  I’m never happy with a book right after I finish it, and I’ve found the best way to deal with that is to really finish it, publish it and close the door on it, or I’ll pick at it forever.

    I got this thing that’s a complete mirror of wikipedia on a little handheld computer thing that’s about as big as one of those light-up coaster things they hand you at a restaurant to page you when your table is ready.  It has a touchscreen and a couple of buttons on it, and probably runs some embedded linux thing on a low-powered system-on-a-chip that can run forever on a pair of AAA batteries.  It uses a micro-SD card to hold the entire wikipedia, which means it can be updated and allegedly hacked to work as a cheapie book reader.  I think it cost 20 dollars.  I don’t know why I bought it, but it has a “random” button, and I could spend hours hitting that button over and over, reading about Frank X. Schwarb, the mayor of Buffalo, New York from 1922-1929, or the Inner Dominion harness racing competition in Australia and New Zealand or Sergio Salvati, the cinematographer who used to work with Lucio Fulci.  It’s an interesting distraction.

    I saw a friend of mine this weekend who I have not seen in 24 years.  She moved here in 2011, but we kept playing email tag, because I never leave the house, and driving down to the peninsula is something I avoid, probably because I used to do it ever day.  This is someone who was a good confidante back in high school, and I probably drove her nuts with all of my depressing tirades about whatever I was depressed about back in 1988.  It’s strange to see someone after such a long gap now, after we’ve both become adults (well, me only sort of) and we’ve missed those huge chunks of life between 18 and 42.  And there’s a time when I relished swapping tales about who ended up where and who is still stuck in Elkhart and who’s in prison and all of that, but I keep up with that stuff less and less, and feel sort of stupid for even keeping track of most of it.

    I also sometimes feel very self-conscious when I catch up with people, because that whole exercise of summing up your life in the last decade or two and trying to make yourself not sound like an idiot and not appear to be an egotistical asshole is a difficult task.  I mean, I enjoyed talking to her, and liked meeting her husband and kid and seeing her house and all of that.  It was good to catch up and we had a good evening together.  But I always find myself wondering if I’m trying to project some kind of fake persona or if I’m going to say something stupid or fixate on some part of the past that the other person wants no part of.  Maybe I think about this too much.

    This is related to a thought I had recently about writer’s block.  I recently outlined a book I’d like to write, spent a lot of time with post-it notes and got it all typed into Scrivener, but then couldn’t really get started with the actual writing.  A big part of that was that the writing wasn’t entirely in my voice; it’s an attempt to read a little big beyond my wheelhouse, and the thinking involved in writing like that made me hesitant to actually get the words down on the paper.  It reminded me of when I used to have these bad first dates, and I’d spend the whole time in my head trying to act like the person that the other person wanted to date, so they would like me.  And I’d second-guess everything I said, wondering if it was the “right” thing.  And I’d always fail miserably.  I think writing is a lot like that, because the best first dates I ever had were the ones where I honestly did not give a fuck what the person thought about me, and I just acted naturally.  I think the best writing I ever do is also when I don’t think about it, and just let the words flow.  It’s not always the easiest thing to do, but it’s what works.

    Speaking of, I should go do some actual writing.

  • Paper journal entry 10/10/96

    […]

    Drifting – pain – autumn’s cool air.  People surround city streets, the majestic banks of nobody, glass towers, palaces of low-frequency shudder.  Tensile tear of sharp metal scales of black, bleak, black, mumbling jets.  I hear one pass now, every night, every night since they took the cranes so near and yet so far I thought it would hit my house during the windstorms, if my house didn’t hit it first.

    Implanted lies, bullshit on a chip.  I slit my flesh deep, probed with the cutters for any subdermal circuitry.  Nothing.

    Watch me play all 28 instruments with one button.  Am I a musician? It’s all on ROM.  Beethoven’s 9th.  But I pushed the button.  I did.  I’m the musician.

    It’s Antarctica, but you’ll have a good coat and some gloves, so don’t worry, -60F will feel like a cool summer breeze in Arkansas.  No, you don’t have to exchange your money.  The strip bars, McDonald’s, and Gap stores all take US cash.  And American Express.  No Discover, though.

    And in Iraq, we use Internet Explorer.  Check out our new website, where you can click Saddam Hussein’s face to hear the sounds of Scud missiles being launched at your IP number.

  • Next book done

    I finished my next book yesterday.

    26 pieces.  38,845 words.  It has a title, but it may change.

    I’m not really done done yet, because I have to come up with a cover (which I hate) and a book description (which I also hate) and maybe think about a new title.  I also have to do the interior design, which is easy.  But the text is done.  It’s not getting any extra stories, and it’s not getting reworked to add in that alien abduction subplot or love story.  It’s done.

    The book is similar in structure to the last one, which means it was a clusterfuck to put together.  This kind of book is essentially plotless, short pieces or cogs or lumps that are put together from smaller pieces, paragraphs torn from free-writes or inspired by tweets or built up from notes taken on a phone.  The little scraps become big slices, and the slices get moved and rearranged and connected until they are big pieces.  And then the big pieces are arranged and reordered and sometimes split back apart and cannibalized and dropped.

    To give you an idea of how much cutting was involved, at one point a little over a month ago, the 38K word manuscript was just over 100,000 words.

    My last book was done on 6/25/12, and this one was born soon after that.  I actually had a few false starts on other things, ideas for books that fell apart after the outline stage.  I keep these outlines, and maybe later one of them will get revisited and become an actual book or story.  And I keep the scraps of writing that come out of them, and some of it ends up in other places.  A sizable chunk of this book is made from pieces of a stalled book about alien abduction.  Other parts are from an aborted book that examines my childhood in Indiana, which I stopped writing when I decided I didn’t want to write about childhood or Indiana.

    The biggest drive on this book was to do another book similar to Rumored.  That didn’t really happen, but I started chasing that this January, and kept at a daily writing quota.  On 1/13 I had 47,252 words in this manuscript.  On 4/3, I had 100,390.  I wrote every single one of those days, even the days I was on vacation, off of work, or sick.  There’s a piece of advice attributed to Jerry Seinfeld (although I can’t find the exact quote from him, just thirdhand references) that the best way to get shit done is to set a daily goal, and then mark each day on a calendar that you do the goal, and aspire to not break the chain by skipping a day.  My initial goal was to stick with adding at least 500 words a day to this draft for a month, and I stretched that to almost three months before I shifted my focus from writing to editing.  So in that sense, the book is already a success.

    I didn’t write another Rumored, and I didn’t write my Infinite Jest.  This book is about half the size of Rumored, and somewhere between my last two in length.  I think that’s fine.  But the eventual goal I keep chasing is to have a book that’s around 100,000 words long, and has a solid nonlinear structure, but still has enough plot to make people not freak the fuck out when they read it.  It won’t be a fully-plotted murder mystery thriller thing, because there are enough of those out there, and that’s not what I do. I don’t know what that is, but it’ll happen.

    I’m now entering the horrible postpartum depression that always follows when I finish a book.  I always wonder if people will like a book after it’s done, and think about what should be next.  I still have all of these release-related tasks, and I’ll probably play a lot of bass just to think about anything but writing.  But I need to do some post-mortem and write down what did and didn’t work for this book, and then seriously start thinking about the next one.  I have some vague ideas, but nothing solid.  I need to get enough of an idea in front of me though that I can start up that Seinfeldian chain again.

    Anyway, I’m happy to get the ninth notch carved in the wall.  (Nine books written?  Shit.)  More news on what’s happening with it when I can tell you more – stay tuned.

  • Mister, if you don’t shut up I’m gonna kick one hundred percent of your ass!

    It’s been like a month since I’ve made any kind of update here, which can only mean one of two things: I decided to go to Mexico and write about the drug trade, and got myself killed by Narcoterrorists, or I’m deep in the middle of writing a book and feel all of my energy has to go there.  And it’s the latter, this time.  So there.

    I think I have a title for this book.  I think it’s close to done, but I now need to read it four times and find all of the mistakes.  It’s what you would call in the software world feature complete.  Maybe not, but close.  I’m pretty sick of it right now, which is a good sign that I’m done with it.  So there’s that.

    I don’t remember why, but I pulled out one of my paper journals the other day and read it.   I journaled obsessively in spiral notebooks from the end of 1993 up until a couple of years ago, at which point it sort of fell off, as my life became far too boring to chronicle, and all of my energy went into other writing projects.  I regret that, and wish I would have done what I did for years, filling at least a page per day of a standard college-rule notebook.  I was reading this journal from 1996, which was amazing.  I guess I consider that a non-year of sorts, because it wasn’t as big of a deal as 1995, when I moved to Seattle, or 1999, when I moved to New York.  1996 was the start of a pretty relaxing period for me, with a steady job and a steady girlfriend, a regular routine and most of my writing on autopilot.

    But, reading the journal, I realize it wasn’t.  I was perpetually single at that point in life, and really struggling with meeting people in this new city.  I had a couple of out-at-second-date situations, and this one dating situation with a girl that went to U of W that absolutely crushed me.  I had all of this dental work done, and spent a lot of time chewing up mass amounts of Tylenol to combat the shoddy work this dentist did to my teeth.  And I really struggled with my first two books.  The grand total of this, by October or so, was a crippling depression, a near-suicidal run where I really didn’t know what I was doing and how I would come out of the other side.  It’s strange though, because when I look back at my history from a high level, I sort of remember going to a new shrink at that time, but mostly just remember leaving my first job and settling into a more 9 to 5 gig where all of my coworkers were older with kids, and that I mostly read a lot of books and published a zine.

    What’s really interesting to me about this period is all of the entries I have surrounding Rumored to Exist.  First, there was a lot of puling about the direction the book was taking, and the challenges involved in writing it.  There’s one set of entries, which maybe I should scan, which is a long numbered list of all of the problems I had at the time with the writing, and what needed to be resolved before I could continue.  And then a week later was an entry talking about why I needed to kill the whole project.  And a week or two after that was a post talking about how I’d completely restructured the book.  This continued for something like six years, so the feeling that I’m in over my head on an endless road with this book I’ve been kicking around for about 9 months doesn’t feel so bad to me.

    Speaking of, I should get back to it.  I would really like to wrap this thing up in the next few weeks.  Stay tuned.

  • The Annotated Rumored to Exist, Hardcover edition

    So I wanted a hardcover of Rumored to Exist, because I’m funny about that, so I made one.  Check it:

    http://www.lulu.com/shop/jon-konrath/the-annotated-rumored-to-exist/hardcover/product-20974619.html

    It’s a hardcover edition of the annotated version that I originally released in 2004.  In fact, it’s the exact text from the 2004 version.  I would have preferred to go over it again, starting with the 2011 re-release and add back in the annotations and do something else with the book blah blah blah but I don’t have time.

    Differences in this edition:

    • Hardcover, with a slip jacket.
    • The paper quality is slightly better than standard POD.  It’s more of a cream color.
    • The cover is an alternate of the original cover.  Same location, but taken during a snow storm.
    • The back cover is a bunch of my notes on legal pads and post-its, along with the post card sent from the Astrodome by Larry Falli.
    • A ten-page introduction explaining the history of the book (up to 2004).
    • A facts and figures section.
    • A Q&A about the book.
    • The 2002 first edition text (possibly with some minor changes) in a different layout.
    • 547 footnotes explaining parts of the text.  This isn’t some DFW/Nabokov “the footnotes are another work of literature” thing; it’s just straight-up reference material.
    • No UPC or ISBN.  Only for sale at Lulu.  No digital edition.

    I don’t expect anyone to buy this – I just did it so I could have a nice hardcover on the shelf.  If you do buy it, expect a great delay from lulu.  It took them two weeks to send mine.  But I think it’s worth the $20 – it’s very nice to see it with the glossy slipcover and everything.

    OK, back to work on the next one.

  • Rumored to Exist, haiku edition

    I totally forgot about this.  A long time ago, I found this program that would scan a text file and generate haiku from it.  I don’t know exactly how it worked; I guess it would find syllable counts of 5-7-5 in the text.  So of course, I fed Rumored to Exist into it.  It looks like it was a copy of the text from shortly before it was published, and not the final draft. Some of these are uncannily funny.  It’s like doing some Burroughs cut-up shit – some of it is hopelessly random, but some of it fits together far too perfectly.

    Here’s the best of the output from it.  Maybe I should put this all in Helvetica and dump it into a pocket book.

    I could feel the hair
    on my head falling out, my
    muscles atrophying.

    CIA was outside
    in a van, or his phone was
    ready to give out.

    I couldn’t even
    email her and ask if she
    was the same person.

    He couldn’t bring a
    gun into a federal
    building anyway.

    Uralic-Altaic
    and Latin American
    languages blended.

    I thought it would be
    in Ohio, it turns out
    it was in Japan.

    Klan was headquartered
    less than an hour from the
    governor’s mansion.

    Nick told me about
    a version of MovieLine
    that worked for pornos.

    Skee-Ball tickets and
    a Hubert Selby, Jr.
    tattoo on my cock.

    I drilled her right there
    on the tile. Within a month,
    it became mundane.

    I was so bored I
    masturbated to the JC
    Penny catalog.

    Doctor McCarthy
    will see you now,” the nurse yelled
    across the concourse.

    RM: No, you dumb fuck,
    I said it was like some bitch
    puking on your dick.

    That’s been my breakfast
    every morning for the
    last decade, still is.

    Carve your name in my
    brain if you think it will stop
    the fucking nightmares.

    I wish it was a
    computer, but even my
    computer was dead.

    They brainwash kids with
    angel dust, impregnated
    in blue star tattoos.

    I should invest my
    money in whether or not
    I should take a piss.

    X-ray comparisons
    between the Dark Lord of the
    Sith and John Merrick.

    Bread, bread… Ghostbusters
    caught the holy ghost in one
    of those ecto-traps.

    I finished the loaf
    of bread, and drank a gallon
    of flat Perrier.

    Marco said. “Not the
    film, but a perfect view of
    the event itself.

    I found myself in
    the men’s room of the DNA Lounge
    in San Francisco.

    God would have to send
    back Ahnold to the manger
    to try to stop it.

    They could even let
    the good guys win and it might
    be entertaining.

    It would make a good
    recordable MiniDisc
    commercial, really.

    And I had hours
    to find Nick and get back on
    a plane for New York.

    Jed cracked open a
    cold one while Elrod, well, cracked
    open a cold one.

    With my extensive
    studies in vomit, I can
    spot fake puke at yards.

    Tito, reading from
    a copy of USA
    Decay. “Fuck!” I said.

    It didn’t feel like
    skin-to-skin contact like the
    package claimed either.

    I could grind them down
    and make counterfeit paper
    pulp in my bathtub.

    Never give money
    to strangers, unless you know
    just how strange they are.

    It’s like that Cheech and
    Chong movie where they had a
    truck made out of dope.

    I shove the clipboard
    up his ass. Okay, so I
    have issues with UPS.

    But I won’t pay those
    bastards at Time-Warner
    for their mind control.

    I liked the Behind
    the Music on Ice-T though.
    He’s pretty funny.

    I need you to go
    thirty clicks up the river
    and catch this frisbee.

    I dropped a fiver
    on the counter for my drink,
    and ran for the door.

    The human body
    is engineered to fail in
    an emergency.

    I raped the cancer
    surgery reward with a
    Dremel moto-tool.

    Leisure Suit Larry
    with a vibrating pager
    attached to your wong.

    And you couldn’t sleep
    on the beach and bum tourists’
    change at this resort.

    I never went to
    class, so I’d have a lot of
    trouble finding them.

    Outside, sirens were
    going off everywhere, the
    riot underway.

    Peter Criss threw his
    drumsticks to the screaming fans
    in the coach section.

    Plus when I wore it
    all day, I lost five to ten
    pounds in sweat. Nitrous…

    Pure oxygen rushed
    through the nosepiece, and
    I inhaled deeply.

    The Gremlin didn’t
    have AC, or even a
    functional vent fan.

    I could pick up my
    paycheck, and I didn’t have
    a dime to my name.

    Tito finally
    bitch-slapped him and told him
    to shut the fuck up.

    John Voight would play the
    chief, and utter the “I’m too
    old for this shit” line.

    With some napkins and
    a straw that’ll work in the
    ambulance, of course.

    I’d break em in half
    on the first stroke.” “Dude, I think
    you’re fucked up,” Nick said.

    Shooting Six People
    in the Fucking Face with a
    Bulldog Revolver.

    I checked out all of
    those religious books and drenched
    them in human blood.

    I asked about this,
    he said it kept the CIA
    from reading his mind.

    Weren’t you born in
    like ’61?” “Dude, I was there, but
    not during the war.

    IQ test last night, so
    I know I’m not stupid, but
    it could be the drugs.

    Santa Claus shapes in
    a piece of plywood with a
    table saw sans guards.

    I’m gonna fuck him,
    and break that god damned gimp arm
    in half with my cock.

    I pour gasoline
    all over myself and light
    myself on fire.

    I pushed him, and watched
    him fall to his death. Then I
    went to 7-Eleven.

    Man, and that’s why I
    kept setting off the metal
    detectors. It worked.

    Her only piece of
    photo ID was a postcard
    of Niagara Falls.

    I can’t just write “THIS
    IS MONEY” on a piece of
    paper and spend it.

    I figured they had
    to use potent stuff to keep
    out the cockroaches.

    I got the second
    one, and found the first, she could
    have it. She’s gone too.