Brain-Addled Air Junkies

HEY YOU!"

I froze. This was the most terrifying sound a struggling writer could hear, the voice of sadism, of evil dreams, of a pain and suffering that rivals the heartbreak of psoriasis. The voice of an editor.

This denizen of some second-rate hell had been vainly nipping at my heels ever since I weaseled out of researching her pet article on an outbreak of Church Lady copycats in French Lick, Indiana. Avoiding her had become more and more difficult as she gradually sealed off my favorite escape routes and I ran out of relatives who were on their deathbed.

I ducked into the women's restroom, only to meet two hulking charwomen prepared to drive me out of hiding with their mops. It looked like the whole building was on retainer for her. I stepped back into the hall, resigned to face the music.

"Here!" my editor said, ramming a book into my stomach that couldn't have weighed more than 25 pounds. "Review this by tommorrow. You've got a whole page to yourself. I'd talk to you about it, only I have to go feed my editorial assistant." As she went off shouting "Igor! Din-din!" I picked myself off the floor and looked at the book it was my fate to review. The Norton Anthology of Pretentious Literature proclaimed the dust-jacket. I read the description on the inside cover.

"New and improved, the Norton Anthology of Pretentious Literature contains twice as much angst and symbolism as the previous edition. More than 1,000 pages of authors overreaching themselves in the quest for metaphysical absolutes: Beckett, Sartre, Robbe-Grillet, Doeblin, Ashbury, Joyce and many other favorites of the cafe society."

So I sat down at my desk and began plowing. Eight hours later I was finished, my hair snow white and my heartbeat a little erratic but otherwise none the worse for wear. Even though I had perused only a small portion of the work, I felt ready to bang out an intellectual manifesto for anthology addicts.

I sat down at my word processor, ready to write. Nothing came out. I was blocked. Blank. The most profound nothingness this side of Proust. I sucked in the primordial void and then barfed till all was meaninglessness, my brain a cranial subterranean pool of anti-meaning.

I took an editorial mop to the mess, scrubbing with strokes so rigorous that they laid tire tracks of emotional trauma across the metaphysical entity that served as a literary cipher for my soul.

Still I remained at zero, the mid-point between Nothingness and anti-Nothingness, which did not necessarily imply Somethingness, but merely the oppositional juxtaposition of elemental thingnesslessness in the compass of universal nessness. Then, I thought of beating around the burning angst-bush that served as the canine existential dogma that blocked my odyssey. I caught on fire, burning, screaming no one heard me, I thought, except the Hearer, who was asleep for a few hours. I was in pain, but thankfully was saved by a Jorge-Luis Borges short story.

Thanks, I said, adding as an afterthought,

"No sweat," said Borges, immediately sensing the hole in my whole, and plunging into the void in my thoughts, again became part of ME (What I AM).

I entered Borges' Labyrinth, turning pages like so many processed bits of the shin bone of the late, great Jimmy Hoffa, then I came to the end of a chapter.

THERE WAS A BLANK PAGE

Why not many blank pages, or pages with the same letter, or random words about random words, Philip Glass on paper, ink as an automatic act, meta-words, that refer back to their physical Existence as the orgasmic climactic union of ink and processed tree stump?

NO!

Actually, no wait a minute. Maybe. No, actually, yes. NO. MAYBE. YES. Three words. What did they mean when used as rhetorical bludgeons to render final verdicts on other words that came before or after them because of the manic tyrannical musings of the Hitlerian author.

Words, words, words. A new store selling packaged bullshit. Can't tell a book by its cover; can't tell a word by its letter, and what is anti-bullshit when all there is is bullshit (and particularly noxious fecal matter at that) and when placed in the great libretto that is the music of life, continues to sound long after the last Existential note is played out, long after the Fat Lady got water on the lung (Rho row roe your boat!) from holding the final C for so long while I tried to come up with something to come after The End of the World (with Nothing Interesting to Follow).

Well, the world did end and without my book review or anything resembling the odious practice of playing with another man's art, his soul, to please thousands of brain-addled air junkies who gulp the stuff like it could make their lives worth living. No, live alone, fair book, and prosper without the words of praise I can shower upon you in my giddy bout of pseudo-creativity.

You to play.