I have been trying to write lately. I am revising a story I should have finished months ago. for coherencies sake I have had to cut paragraphs that I rather liked. I am too lazy to write anything new here. Perhaps you will enjoy them, decontextualized though they are.

Eight months have passed since Byron’s funeral and I am still squinting against the darkness. My pencil is carving its self portrait into my hand. The reader can not yet understand these things. He is put off by stylistic flourishes. He is suspicious of themes of death and obsession. His own presence here is an embarrassment to him. The address seems to him to be an appeal to the gods. It is a romantic convention. It reminds him of the time of poetry – the old dreams of sentiment and communication. He has been suckled on the catalogue. He can lose himself in the file and the index. Narrative is for more decadent natures. It is something for which one should be ashamed. But I am not ashamed. I will write two hundred pages into the past. I did not love Byron but I will sing his elegy until I collapse from exhaustion. I will do it because I have become habituated to such actions. I will turn his life into an epic. I will assemble a chorus and I will thrash it with iambs and heroic couplets until it wails in agony. I will do this because for me writing tragedy is like copying from the dictionary. I do it for the simple pleasure of scratching my pencils down to nubs. I could just as well not write and merely grind them away, but then I would not feel this pain in my fingers and the pain is everything.

I haven't slept in days, nor have I been able to paint. I can feel the blank canvases accumulating in my closet silently conspiring against me. Half formed ideas smash into one another and the walls of my skull, leaving twisted wreckage, the macabre remnants of creativity: William Burroughs nightmares -- endless junk and sodomy and defecation -- and my hobbling seventy year old neighbor wrapped around the machinery of her walker, her face all in those same Lucian Freud hues that invade everything.

expect more of this in the coming days