Tonight White Castle expects about 6,400 people during its candlelight dinner event (they take reservations). Love writing? Love to be writing or to have written? You date a short story, marry a novel, so what’s a poem? Will we watch more or less porn today? (It smells like more.) It’s easier just to watch TV. TV is closer to reality anyway; it’s truer than the book. (The insanity of TV is the insanity of human life.) Liars of the heart. I wrote today might just mean a check to your garbageman or lord or where some say we lost our romance, our thumbs (oh those ghost phones): LH6, NSA, RUH? I read that book means you’ve heard of the title. It all a circle jerk in here, isn’t it? In the beginning was the word, but what type of love was that? Ah, the seduction of eloquence. I read for plot. Do you? No, but in 1990 David Letterman, in an odd reversal of his usual policy, paid Miss USSR to appear on his show. And then what happened? (The fee was four cartons of Marlboros.) I don’t know but it was lyrical to have her in the Green Room and ever put bananas in your coffee filter and made the coffee (why not?) so I pray to the big brassy lie of books.

First love is pretty great until you meet your second love at a bar one night. A man spends $1.60 today for every dollar a woman spends. Love reading a book or to have read a book? The insanity of reading is the synapses lifting 2D to 3D—you believe this shit? Or, why do we write/read books at all? Because, as you well know from your own clip-clopping, books are not pills that produce health when ingested in measured doses. Books do not shape character in any simple way-if, indeed, they do so at all-or the most literate would be the most virtuous instead of just the ordinary flesh-sacks with larger vocabularies. Sadly, my second wife caused me either horror or horripilation during love (her kisses decalcomania). Or, can we bring more love around here? Time kills it all, your passion, your dachshund and/or funny hamster, and then the stacks of books you’ll never read. (Words are clocks) I mean can we stop with all this literature and art stuck in the self-reflective light of the here and now, a lonely place inhabited by the solipsistic me. Also can I get some greasy fries? I mean big ol’ gas station gloopy tater wedges? If no, then GYPO. And beer me. Then shut out the light and let’s get to writing.