In the Beginning...:
October 20th, 1998

My sinuses are being used as Bikini islands and my tonsils are trying to stage a palace coup. My spine is toxic puffed wheat. The inanimate carbon rods are going to shatter with nice little tinklies suitable for for a memorial CD: Auntie Dynamite fucks Auntie Dynamite, in four part harmony. It's dark, and I'm wearing sunglasses... wait, wrong movie.

I like places that are windy and high, and when I die, I'm going to be cremated and thrown off one. Rootless in life, rootless in death. If they put me in the ground, I'm coming back.

Auntie leans over my shoulder and shrieks, "I leave you alone for five minutes and you start nattering about death."

"Stop that. My ears are screwed up. I'm running a fever. Check my forehead!"

Auntie acts quickly. She starts smoking all my cigarettes. Brandishes a rectal thermometer.

"If you're really sick," she murmurs, "you really should have your temperature taken. If you're not sick enough for this, then write, damnit."

Okay, okay.

Some years ago I had a conversation that went something like this:

"Why did you say That Word on your answering machine?"

"Grandma, it's my answering machine, I pay for it, and I'll put whatever the hell I damn well want on it. Now excuse me, please, I know it's the middle of the afternoon, but I'm going on two hours sleep and I need to get more. I'll talk to you later."

That word, all words, dog my existence. I have five colours of post-it notes, six yellow pads, half a package of lined looseleaf paper, half a package of printer paper, several dozen pens and pencils, and a battered whiteboard, and a fast dwindling pile of cigarettes.

I sleep with two more yellow pads and I regularly find ink on random parts of my body. I have four pens that I particularly like and some that I don't. But I'm not fussy -- some of my notes are written in contè crayon because that's all I had handy.

I also sleep with many books, and I put my pillow wherever there's a blank space. I have slept with my dictionary, my thesaurus, and my Raymond Chandler Omnibus.

I love the word, in all shapes and sizes, obscene or serene, if it's the right word for the job then that's the word you've gotta use.

"How many languages do you speak?" I was once asked by a young man hopelessly trying to impress me with his literary machismo.

"One, but I speak it very well."

Which is not entirely true, because I speak the languages of sanity, truth, justice, savagery, danger and love. These have no dictionaries. They are all part of the same thing.

I don't know that I speak them well, but I'd rather speak them badly than not at all. This need has driven me from places and people that I would've otherwise loved, but where the languages were spoken with such a horrible accent that I couldn't make out what they were saying any more than they could make out a goddamn thing from me.

There are a lot of other tongues, some of which I speak even worse, and some of which are totally incomprehensible to me. My religion dialect is spiritual kin to Esperanto.

Auntie wants to know when I'm going to talk about sex, since in her opinion, if I have this much time to spend on linguistic philosophizing, I should've been out getting laid. She's still ticked at me for going to a triple gallery opening, the place swarming with artists (who as we all know have a gratuitously liberal sexual attitude, at least in theory, but exempting writers) and drinking martinis and even buying some artwork and not getting anywhere vaguely near having sex with any of them. She figures if I couldn't get laid in that setting that I may be hopeless.

I say, petulantly, "I know what I want and it wasn't there. Besides, I didn't like any of them that much."

"Like you never had sex with someone you didn't like before. Remember that guy from way back who called your answering machine three times in a row because he wasn't done cursing yet? Great sex."

"Auntie, that was six years ago. I've outgrown that."

"Too bad," Auntie says, and goes back to smoking all my cigarettes.

The sexiest man in my life right now is a fictional character, which probably accounts for all this wordplay, not to be confused with foreplay, but often related. Bet a guy could get pretty far with Auntie if he leaned over her shoulder whispering "heteronym... pangram... etymon... ossss-cuuuu-late..."

Auntie, when he told you "We're all screwed, but that doesn't mean it's not a noble mission", I don't think that's what he meant.