Dear Blaster Al,
“College” is under Work, because
it’s preparation for a career.
It’s vocational training, for a job
telling lies and screwing people.
The help, your customers, government regulators.
The Schools of Business, Education, Law, Social Welfare,
Criminology, Library Science, everything but the College of
Arts and Sciences, is engaged in a conspiracy against the public.
They’re teaching them how to cheat and lie. It all amounts to
lies and bullshit. And now the craft of writing has been professionalized.
You have to know how to market yourself, and where to do it. The media
of mass communication. Slick magazines, newspapers like USA Today,
radio and television stations. Anything with commercial advertisements.
One must hold his or her tongue. Not say what’s as plain as the nose on our faces.
Just hold your nose and do it. It’s a test. Do you have what it takes.
Do you want it bad enough. Is you is or is you ain’t an existentialist.
There’s no end in sight, Al. Why would it end? It works.
I have met the enemy and he is I.
Can I hold out. All by myself.
How long can I make it?
40 years? 39? 38½?
I am failing by degrees.
But still here. As John Hartford says
about the earthquakes in
I’m still here. Rumors of my death
have been greatly exaggerated.