We moved back to
Granny Brown, me and Brenda and Baby Owen.
selling real estate. We weren’t eligible for welfare
because we did not maintain a separate residence.
I wasn’t eligible for unemployment because I had
resigned my last position. One step ahead of a shoeshine.
I found a job in
A college-degree job. It was a quantum leap forward.
I had benefits. I was on salary. I made three times what
I had been making as a laborer and clerk. Well, I was a clerk,
but I had a desk and a typewriter, access to a copying machine.
I had money for postage to send stories and poems out to little magazines.
To buy small press books. Larry and Hazel had Justin Winston print up
Playing Hurt and Raw Energy: A Cookbook for Action Painters.
I sent them out. I got back work in exchange. My productivity
went up, but also, the form of what I was doing opened up.
I called what I was writing my chronicle, after Céline,
who said he didn’t have time to answer the gazettes,
he had his chronicle to finish, his endless, or enormous debts
to pay. I answered the gazettes in my chronicle.
I left the letters in, too. I concatenated the pages
in order of composition, gave book-length sections
titles, and called them books. I gave them beginnings,
middles, and endings, not necessarily in that order.
Not necessarily in any order. Necessarily not in
any order, except the order they came out of my head in.
I was the salvage archeologist of the Mall Builder culture.