Philadelphia (cont'd)

I keep thinking of the trip
when Balder and Jennifer,
and Owen, Jean, and Ella Blue
flew out to Seattle with me and Brenda
for my mother's 85th birthday party
and family reunion. None of us was
a business major. Malcolm Lowry died by misadventure.
I put on my ULA Literary All-Star trading card. Sit next to
a hippie chick coming back from Israel, to Philadelphia.
With a Sony Walkman. I wouldn't used to admit, or claim to be
a writer but the truth will out. It's like being pregnant of cooking cabbage.

When it wants to come, it comes,
unbidden and unstanchable.
If you disrespect it--like by
shutting it off before it's done--
it might stop coming. This is every
ballplayer's secret fear. You don't know
where it comes from, and it might stop
as suddenly as it started. How do you
propitiate it, except by guesswork and superstition.

The hotel let me in at 12:30. Pat was in the room.
I took a train from the airport for $1 by showing them
my Medicare card. The first time I have used it.
I walked from Suburban Station to the Embassy Suites hotel,
using a map a lady at the airport gave me. I ate in-house,
at a TGI Friday's, ordering a dip platter and a steak.
When I come to town 75¢ don't mean a Goddamned thing.
This is bigger than Miami. Pronounced mi-am-uh.
There are 8 million stories in the city. Bukowski spent
five years sitting on a bar stool in Philadelphia.

The thing to order in a Friday's is
Corona Extra. It will come with
a wedge of lime. I had French onion soup
yesterday at the Cheese Barn in Panama City.
Man, this is just like downtown Crestview.
I saw this on television.

The ULA met at Ludwig's restaurant to discuss strategy, meet each other, or revive acquaintance, and entertain the press.

No members of the press attended.

A lot of German beer was drunk.

Pat had not met all of the ULAers, but had corresponded with them.

In fact, he had not met me.

He sold two books.

We talked about the state of letters in America. The professionalization of writing. The New York Literary Establishment.

Standard outsider line.

Who will be the Elvis Presley Karl Wenclas acts as the Col. Tom Parker for?

A lot of beer was drunk, toasts made, past ventures relived.

Karl read from a letter I wrote him in 2000--five years ago--in which I said I did not consider myself an outsider, I considered a mainstream American writer in the tradition of Thoreau and Whitman; although self-taught, I was not untrained. I had been writing hammer and tongs for nearly 30 years. To dismiss me as a hopeless amateur or a crank was silly, and would not work. I also said people were looking for the kind of writing I did and couldn't get in anywhere else.

To whoever has it, celebrity rent is a monopoly. They are 100% of the available supply. All else is imitation and jealous knocking.

I may be saying the same thing five years from now, as I finish my 39th year as a writer. An unheralded, unsung writer. Alone in my private glory.

I'm not alone. I am a member of a group of idealists and enthusiasts, energetic, full of piss and vinegar, German beer.

I didn't get stupid.

I didn't puke straight up in the hotel afterwards.

Pat and I talked, in the room, afterwards, and went to bed at 10:00 p.m., like a couple of old folks in a retirement home.

There's a TV in the living room and a TV in the bedroom of our suite. Neither one has been turned on. I don't know what's happening with Karl Rove, the Bolton nomination, the Supreme Court vacancy, or Meet the Press.

Thoreau called the news old ladies gossiping at their tea.

I called Brenda for a chicken report.

Today is the reading at the Medusa Lounge.

I go last.

I am prepared, but I can ad lib.

I watched Calle 54 the day before I left, at home, and identified with the musicians who were all working at their profession with a sense of the history of their craft, and working in a marginalized métier, compared to Michael Jackson, say. Latin, or Afro-Cuban jazz.

I could make a documentary about underground writing.

Well, I'm writing a book about it, which is even better, to a reader, than a movie.

One of the things that made the reading at the Six Gallery historic is everybody who was there wrote about it.

A drunken heckler taunted Allen Ginsberg.

Lord, grant me a drunken heckler. As a Boswell to my Johnson.

I'm my own Boswell. And my own Johnson.

Anything you have to do, you have to go on and do yourself, Roland Kirk says.

Henry Miller wrote a red notebook along with the travels he went on as raw material for The Air Conditioned Nightmare.

It was later published as The Red Notebook.

John Steinbeck wrote the Log From the Sea of Cortez.

R. Crumb sold a suitcase full of drawings for enough money to buy a villa in the South of France.

This notebook combines several trips. To Tallahassee, to Philadelphia, to Seattle, to Atlanta, and to Pennville, Georgia. Avec digital camera.

What I wrote when I was away from my computer and typed up afterwards.

A book is a tangible artifact,
like a CD, a DVD, or a lithograph
of a painting, which can be carried in a backpack,
read more than once, in any weather and every day,
loaned to friends, photocopied, dog-eared,
written in the margin of, displayed, like the logo
on a T-shirt, a moltin' 'gator embroidered above the left breast,
I'm sitting on the patio of a chain restaurant connected with my hotel
eating a complimentary buffet breakfast under cloudy skies, sparrows,
I feel like the Birdman of Alcatraz. I'm looking at a red brick building
with a green dome on top, surrounded by high-rises. The green is a patina.
Copper, oxidized. Exfoliating rhythm. Like electrons boiling off the cathode
of a vacuum tube. The plate a catcher. Lynn Freed is a bottom.
Fuck me, fuck me, make me feel cheap. Here, Julius--hold this.
Kerouac wrote about the "10,000 sneering college writing instructors."
In Vanity of Duluoz. Which is available at used bookstores and on the Internet.