Hemingway killed himself because the writing wouldn't come anymore.
Thelonious
Monk just quit playing, and watched television at Baroness Nica's
cat house in
Weehawken, New Jersey. Charles Crumb wrote cartoons,
but he just wrote speech
bubbles, in denser and denser text.
He committed suicide too. Hunter S. Thompson
committed suicide.
Kurt Vonnegut manumitted his characters. In Breakfast of
Champions,
wasn't it? He died a natural death. He had
a career. Giving commencement addresses.
He told
Charles Willeford to write about successful people.
Not losers. Willeford
died. The booze and cigarettes
got to him. People get old and die. Their bodies
wear out.
Their minds, their souls. Some of them just get tired.
I feel like
a failure. What's the point of continuing.
It's more trouble than it's worth.
Nobody cares.
My grandchildren will miss me. It would be
a hardship on Brenda
if I died. But she would
make it. She's self-reliant. People love her.
I
feel like a fuck-up. My life did not
amount to much. I wasted it
writing
poems on scraps of paper.
What was I thinking?
Enough's enough.
When you
reach the end, quit.
But what if I already reached it.
What if it was last
book. How would I know?
I guess I'll keep on going. What else do I know
how
to do, but what I'm doing. It's all I know.
I thought I was doing something honorable
and worthwhile.
It might have been pointless and selfish. Do I just keep doing
it,
as long as I can, until they pry my cold, dead fingers from the trigger,
to
mix a metaphor? Stop me, before I write more.
Stop yourself. Or keep on.
Finish
the job you started.
Don't quit now, just because
nobody wants it. What about
your sense of
professionalism. Your vocation. Not everybody
is chosen. The
miracle doesn't happen when you become
successful as a writer, William Saroyan
says, but when
you become a writer at all. Skipjack, caught in the pocket,
rally.
They storm the net. A poet storms Parnassus.
Zzzzzt--wrong. Bugs Bunny cartoon.
Loony
tunes and merry melodies.
Who's blowing xylophone there, man?