Q: Didn't you ask the State of Florida to buy your house in Delray Beach and turn it into a museum, naming you the curator of your own collections? Let you live there until you died, rent-free?

A: Yes. This was after seeing the Hemingway House, in Key West, and Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings' Cracker House, in Cross Creek.

Q: What did they say?

A: Their answer was no reply.

I guess they didn't think I was serious.

I asked them to name me a Living Fossil, I asked them to find a publisher for the books of my stack, and to find a library to buy the original manuscripts to the unpublished books.

I asked them to give me $250,000. $50,000 a year for five years. This when a grant was $2,500. And you couldn't apply for a year after you'd won. And all the grants went to writing instructors.

Q: What did you hope to do--shame them into giving you a grant?

A: They can't be shamed.

I wanted to show what an artist is up against. In America. Or in Florida.

Last book, I asked them to name me Chronicler Laureate.

I started calling myself Chronicler Contender again.

It's in the title of the book.

GULF COAST BLUES: A MONTH IN THE LIFE OF FLORIDA CHRONICLER CONTENDER RAZZ HEAP, THE HAPPIEST MAN ALIVE. November 16 - December 9. 44,000 words. I drive over to Florida's Forgotten Coast, and spend the night in the Wakulla Lodge. The editor of The Seaside Times reprints an excerpt from my last book in her paper. We spend Thanksgiving at the Magnolia Tree House in Grayton Beach with Balder and Jennifer and Owen and Jean and the grandchildren. Jennifer's family are there. The Saunders Brothers and Kyle Ogle play at Pandora's, outside, in the chickee hut. I drive up to Sneads, to Lake Seminole, and stay at the Seminole Lodge. I am hassled for taking a photograph of the water tower at Malone CI. I drive over to Florida's Emerald Coast, on several day trips. I buy a discarded copy of The Florida Handbook at the library and apply for the position of Chronicler Laureate again. There's a new Secretary of State, and a new governor, since I last applied. This book is about the mullet culture versus the corporate cubicle dot-com culture, or Florida's Forgotten Coast turning into Florida's Emerald Coast, before our very eyes, while the government looks the other way and the media run booster ads for the developers, rah-rah pieces for runaway growth. Unashamed greed. Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?

They have no sense of decency left.

I don't just theorize this. I test the hypothesis.

I'm like Henry Miller putting the list of Guggenheim winners in the back of The Air-Conditioned Nightmare as an addendum.

It burns my nanny. When I see the lickspittles they give money to. The asskissers and whited sepulchers

Q: You don't need their help. You're doing it without them. Their help would come with strings attached. Government support for the arts is like Hitler's Reich Ministry of Culture banning the Entartete Kunst. You're holding a one-man Salon of the Rejected.

A: I know.

Q: Don't get your dauber down.

A: I know.