Excerpt From Traumnovelle

And so to write/type/keyboard my way out of the night, or at least through the night, to trace the contours of this room the way it shapeshifts as the pulsing light of this starry evening affects even the wells and transforming everything I see.

Beneath the moon, a country eye surveys all it sees. The time has come, the teacher said, to map out my insanities.

I’m calling this a novel so I don’t end up in jail. Though I already live in a prison—of sorts.

You can’t spend your way out of feeling like this. You can’t think your way out of feeling like this. Or drink your way, or fuck your way, or even hate your way. All you can do is hope to live long enough that this feeling of sickness/disappointment/dread will eventually go away for a while, recede like a radioactive red tide even if we all know that due to the lunar cycle and its effect on our gravity, it will return stronger & further & more rancid than before.

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Implement (impudent) impotence. All humor is useless when practiced by someone who has no acquaintance with death. I’m a poorly fed man so you have to understand that I am almost always hungry, and being almost always hungry affects the way you move through the world.

My father owned several collections of Doonesbury when I was growing up; my aunt had the first three books in a series called Truly Tasteless Jokes. That, along with overgenerous helpings of childhood trauma & neglect, explains pretty much everything you need to know about my sense of humor.

I am a fecund steaming pile of ugly psychological shit .

My Retesting pen, snagged from an education conference many years ago by my wife, is so dear to me that when it runs out of ink, instead of tossing it in the garbage like you would with most pens, I replace its inkstem with an insktem from another, less valued, pen.

I am here, I said, to plead my case before an unseen jury.

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