When I made the decision to become a writer:

It was in the spring of 2007 I was dressed up in my bright red dress shirt, slick tie, newly shined black shoes, fresh hair cut and shave, letting my minitruck warm up early in the morning to go to my weekly breakfast networking meeting. I missed both weeks prior and my plan that day was to make up for it by showing up early, bright-eyed and filled with a rejuvenated enthusiasm hooting, “har har har” or something like that as I walked in. When I locked my front door after saying goodbye to my dog, Saint Mook, I started to unlock my truck I just couldn’t do it, I could not get in and drive to the meeting. Instead I went back in my house, gave the Mook a meaty treat, unbuttoned my shirt, made some coffee and started writing longwinded prose. Several minutes after the meeting started the president of the club sent me a text message asking me if I was okay. “Overwhelmed” is what I sent back and I was overwhelmed. For years I just wasn’t happy doing what I was doing. After college I started a brain washing business and I had it going pretty well after running it for six years and finally making what people commonly call “good money” I just could not bear the thought of doing it anymore. The more success I had at the business the worse I felt. The weekly meeting brought me a ton of business and money, but something just wasn’t right about it. Truly, I am a bit of a slob. The thought of paying someone to clean my brains seems awfully ridiculous to me even if they are dirty. As far as my values go I just don’t really care about things like brains, lungs and colons. It is just the way I am. I don’t care about it. I would rather live in a cabin with plywood floors, wood burning heat and a picnic table to sit at and fuel my temple in between creative fits. I am not trying to be anti-bourgeois or live like a bird, that’s just my taste and I am just not capable of understanding why people would assign so much value to these material items, stainless steel microwaves and china hutches full of plates. So when I was selling my service even though I knew I was doing a good job, providing value and service, it just meant very little to me. On top of it meaning very little to me I felt like I was encouraging something of little value to be valued in the world. I felt like my body and mind where always against me, my whole life was a Sin and that’s how I took it and I still take it whether it really is or not isn’t much concern to me. I take it that way because I was capable of more and I knew I was. My labor was not a labor of love and I had reached a point in my life where that was the only labor I was capable of. I love being the brain cleaner, but finally it got old as all things do. In the winter prior to this I had begun to write. Not only was I writing I was reading, going to lectures, researching and expanding my mind. My girlfriend who I thought I was going to marry suddenly sabotaged and broke up our relationship in December that year. It was an event that forced me to look deep into myself, reflect and call upon unseen forces to guide me. I was fueled with almost an unlimited enthusiasm for self-discovery after that, vowing to live the life I wanted sick and tired of suffering. I set my primary objective to pursue my labor of love and write. I had always been a whimsical poet my whole life never paying much attention in school, busy scribbling lyrical epics in the back of class or just daydreaming, thinking of dark heroism and being a genius of some kind. I always found intellectual stimulation and truth in the rap songs I heard growing up, something about freestyle rap seemed so far different from other music, it was like freedom recorded. It came out of spontaneous thought; free thought. Older people never much appreciated any of the truth the freestyle of these poets reviled or would validate any of it. “Ban the filth” said they. I always thought the rapper was a genius, a self-reliant genius who spoke more truth than any of my teachers or so called leaders and even the so called, “mentors” I would later encounter. I would have gotten to where I am faster without a mentor. I say, “Beware of people who want to help you or say they can help you get where they are for a fee. Instead, call on ghosts as mentors, but still ghosts don’t know where you your going as well as you do.” I have heard Les Brown (a popular mentor) talk smack on Fifty-cent. He even called him “fifty-cents”. What an idiot, that Les Brown. How can a peddling inspirational speaker talk trash on a real artist who is successful by what God gave him? I was taught to obey authority, raised a “Christian” and stayed one until I finally picked up a bible for myself and knew I could write poetry as good as that even though the authorities wouldn’t agree, but I always had a real beef with authority anyway. I am not a big fan of people selling snake-oil which is all authority amounts to. All through the grades my mind wondered during almost every subject except for psychology. I have always wanted to learn things that aren’t taught in school and when I was in school mostly what I thought about was them not the subjects being taught. I have always been intrigued by the human mind and the current human condition and their inner connections. Not only that, but my high-school psychology teacher was the only adult I knew that could also see the genius in artistic works such as music. Roman Pettibone related psychology to real life by showing me how new discoveries where reflected in art and music. He was the first artistic influence I ever had even though he wasn’t an artist he did appreciate it like one. During that time of my life I was a punkarocker, I was in a band called the “Temporally Patient Time-Bombs” needless to say we never made it big or got a record deal or I would be on tour. My other artistic influences where N.W.A., Easy-E and Bad Religion. Later on in college the only professors who really ever seemed to have any answers about any of the important questions in life was some of the professors of psychology. I had a lot of questions going into psychology, questions like: What is the purpose of life? How can I make the suffering go away? Why can’t I just have some peace? I was raised in a family that encouraged ignorance, racism, ego, and set the pattern of my life in motion for destruction and suffering by time I got to college I was miserable. Even though I was fully melted into America’s famous pot, poor worried and bog-trodden, it didn’t seem that way to me, sure I was worried and bog-trodden, but in my mind I was separate from everyone and everything else and thus I was living a lie because I wasn’t separate. Everything that happened in the world also happened in me. No matter what successes I had on the outside by appearances was empty and superficial. Even though my mind was in another reality during school I always got good grades and went to college quickly picking up psychology as my major area of study. For the most part I saw college as a continuation of high-school, mostly rote memorization and the learning of superficial facts that would soon be forgotten. I wasted more time trying to learn German than I did playing Super Mario Brothers when it first came out, my mind just doesn’t work that way as far as learning languages. I found college classes pointless and boring, but I loved learning about myself so I decided to go on the track towards graduate school in psychology. I soon found out I couldn’t deal with being a conformist enough to even bring myself to apply for graduate school. I was also shy, inhibited and generally pretty antagonistic and angry most the time. After a few independent study classes with graduate students working on forgiveness and hope studies and the University of Kansas I soon was repudiated by the academic environment. I was also emotionally unstable during college, I couldn’t focus or take a breath. My neurotic behavior in college was also because of a girl mostly. Had I been more stable I may have went on with graduate school, the opportunity was all there I just didn’t want it because I wasn’t ready. I couldn’t deal with the plot before me, I was incessant analyzer of information and the more I thought the cloudier my perception of reality became. While I was in college I worked as a produce dude at a grocery store. It sucked; I hated it. Everyday I dealt with people in their most primate mode of life as they gathered food. I woke up at 4:20 AM to be at work at 6:00 and build the “wet-rack”. The wet-rack is the rack that sprays all the lettuce, spinach, greens, cabbage, broccoli and other vegetables that need water. At night someone would take it all down and store it on big green racks in the cooler then in the morning I would go through it all, putting back what was good and throwing away what was rotten. I made it nice and pretty and all the different vegetables would be level all the way down and then right before the misters began to spray water a loud “Singing in the rain” came on the loudspeaker. Soon after college I started my own business cleaning brains, it wasn’t anything I wanted to do, but it was a simple business I could run, make a living and propel myself to financial freedom with in order to do what I really always wanted to do (live in the woods with nature and write). As for not becoming a conformist, the business I was running required it to. So yes overwhelmed is how I was feeling that morning, I was being pushed forward by the frustration of living out of harmony with what I really wanted to do, but I was also being ushered onward by inspiration. On a daily basis poetic rhyme was flowing through me. I was thinking clearly and writing down the vision I was seeing for my life, painting the picture I saw in my mind. I was highlighting the things in my life I had that I wanted to grow with gratitude and with diamond hue emblazoned tears; the vision embraced me so that I was continually thankful for everything in my life because I knew a wonderful becoming was in the works. The struggles, the suffering and emotional pain I experienced up until then all put me in a position now to act upon my vision of what I wanted my life to be, to spend my days doing what I wanted to do, taking life for better for worse as my plot and planting a garden there. By making a detailed record of my vision people and events began to organize around me. My mistakes began to work for me, my whims seemed to lead me to the knowledge I needed to accomplish my goals. I was planting seeds and abandoning them in the soil of my mind. Later that day when the president of the networking club called me I explained that I just had to move forward and obey my whims. I made a decision to create the life of my dreams and acted on it. I made the decision to abandon my former life and life the life I want back in 2007 and now I am living in that creation. In July of 2008 just over a year after making the decision to become a full-time writer I found a cabin with plywood floors in the woods, quit cleaning brains permanently, I live each day according to my whims and write to my hearts desire. I sit around writing, drinking coffee and beer all day if I want to, hike in the woods with my dogs, read the classics, paint craziness, take pictures, make videos raise chickens, smoke tea and I have a record of it all.

Cheaper than psychotherapy is why

The reason I create art is to heal myself. I am a neurotic half-crazed lunatic with insane tendencies towards avarice, doubt and fear. Art is my coping strategy for life, the process of healing photographed in still life, a frozen moment etched in time and an open book for the reading of universal truths that transcend time and my own lifespan. The book, the poem, the painting serves as a context for future beings and gives me a connection of communication that serves beyond what I can act and do in my lifetime. I write sincerely and I get healed, I grow in spirit, in awareness and the purpose of expressing these feelings in art is create more art, to be self-multiplying and compounding, to let the energy behind it blend with itself in the beings who see it and create more art and feelings. I choose to publish my art here because no publisher wants to take a chance on an artist who sets trends rather than follows them. They want safe money. I can’t blame them, they’re running a business, they have to be lame brains. People want what Thoreau referred to as, “easy reading” I wish to write nothing of the sort—far from it. I want to do as Jack Kerouac wrote about in his 30 essentials and “blow as deep as I want to blow”, to publish my “scribbled secret notebooks and wild type written pages” and discuss every taboo known to man. No publisher cares about “the holy contour of life” or “writing in recollection and amazement for yrself.” The publisher needs a sure thing, commercial art. They want to publish books that they know will sell and make them money, it’s their business. I have no interest in writing for a market; I would rather create my own market by what I write. I can publish the wildest craziest most “bottomless from the bottom of the mind”, I can express myself in my pure unedited form. These are the pictures in my imagination; my mind itself that I am sharing with the world, it goes beyond selling copies of my works. I would rather give away copies of a better product untouched by corporate America than to sell myself like a whore to the muckraking, chaotic world of industry, advertising and marketing. Satan and his helpers want you to believe that there is something that you need to be happy, to be successful and at peace. They also want you to believe that you can only get it for a limited time. Nobody needs to observe my works, they can certainly do without ever reading them, there is no time limit for which they will be available. I do have a brand I am the new preacher in town and I represent a hellishly mad generation, a generation whose sopping with apathy and sees a only an occasional twinkling of hope in the darkness that seems to brighten as they pound away at their work. What I am accomplishing by this nonconformity in marketing and calling out of it’s evil pretenses is providing the insight to the people with lots of money in the world and who want to help bring the world closer to heaven is that it is edge that will do it, that is the reliance on self that creates more art and more awareness not suffering, not sacrifice or hard work, not empty dollars earned by this ridiculous economic hybrid system— no matter how many dollars are thrown at charity they will not do any good when they are contaminated with the taint of control and manipulation. I am proving what Emerson said was right, that “…our painful labors are unnecessary and fruitless…” I am telling my fraternal twins, “don’t pay any attention to the marketplace, instead write for yourself, amaze yourself with your mind and it will find it’s own form of expression, it’s own context that will serve it best, just write, paint, sing! Write sincerely and you can not fail.” I can publish what I want! And if I can do it so can you. This is the consequence of freedom, this is what makes life worth living and people have paid with their lives to get us to this point to not take advantage of such freedom is an insult to nature, to God and it is Sin. People have suffered to get us here which means God has suffered along with us, to say it all is in vain is to say that the world will go to the Devil. The world is going to be had by God; it just is so. To not develop our minds, our modes of thought our potential is as immoral as slavery, as rape or stealing. It is the denial of all things life, the denial of more, a greater and better becoming; its cultural suicide. People need to read. To make this happen today, the poets of the world, the artists will have to stand up and say so, they will have to get dirty and lend themselves over to the dogface criticism of the so-called “enlightened” and superlative self-admiring dictators of morals. People don’t read for many reasons. I think the main reason people don’t read because authors lack in what is referred to as edge or flow as it is called in the art of hip-hop. The literary world needs breath, people want to read something that provokes them, challenges them and inspires them to do the same for others. We live in an information age where the only information people are taught to learn is the information in the lines. I wish to send a message of immeasurable importance between the lines, one that is actually unspeakable, but magically communicate-able and by The Vestal Fire the observer of this process will have a point of reference to accomplish the same.

kindling

Ima disgruntled poet, a half-time painter, a philosopher and a man who looks at his feces in great detail taking gross pride in his decrepit hobby. After seven years of business ownership, suburban living, following societal expectations and standards, entrepreneurial endeavors, self help books, seminars, silver-tongued speech trainers, selling the religion of language, so called gurus, teachers, preachers, and overall lies piled on lies I turn to the holy contour of life. I have taken to Rattlesnake Hill as a refuge from the pains that ail me as to heal myself and methinks healing the world which methinks is a perfect mirror reflection of my own bored out rotted soul decaying from snake cop treachery that seeks only control- control!

In my first novel Notes from Rattlesnake Hill, due for publication and ripe—I describe a “frozen moment” I experienced while in artistic ecstasy when I arrived on Rattlesnake Hill with instant apropos I began to reflect on his life as if I had just died and it was flashing in strobes as I recorded what I saw using a list of words I randomly picked out of a stack of books on my desk at the time and then wrote them in separate columns and shuffled them then sat them side by side now a juxtaposed map of language in which my story was improvised using the words as a sort of connect the dot puzzle or wind instrument as to defeat my own personal mythologies I knew would show up as I recorded the vision. I spent five months writing continuous raw and blood dripping prose that punches you along the way juking back and forth, jabbing and hitting you with blunt body shots that sting through your spine and leave you shaking like a scared child in a nightmare, finally I knock you out with a blind sided power stroke and it’s worth every minute of action! My intention is not to make you feel better just to make you feel something and you will with Notes from Rattlesnake Hill.

Notes from Rattlesnake Hill:

(A synopsis)

Oliver Deacon was a certified brainwashing agent when he was last conscious of himself…when he last had memories, hopes, personal ambition, moral standards or any standards for that matter. Since that time Oliver has taken a vacation at the other end of eternity (wherever that may be) and a rudely honest Rattlesnake has become of him. In Oliver’s place he has burned every bridge for Oliver and as the serpent works through him, moving his pen, spending all his money on Jonnie Walker Red, huge sacks of Tea and writing sporadic prose in secret notebooks, poetic random collages of wicked contrasts and uncontrolled folly. For five months Oliver is nowhere to be found. (Probably out whacking his pud!) Now this peculiar serpent has used him as a host and possibly made something of his life, getting rid of his television, his high fructose corn syrup, his toothpaste and deodorant. He awakens to find himself naked and shivering and shaking—his teeth rattling in an old cold cabin in the middle of the woods nested on a hillside amongst rock formations and thick overgrown vines and brush. Now Oliver is out of money and hasn’t received a paycheck from the brain washing warranty program for two months after the Rattler quit his job for him and took to the hills. His bank account has been emptied and replaced with the Notes from Rattlesnake Hill which is all that is left of him.

I like to write as if, if I don’t my soul will darken every day of my life and burn dirty, roaring out black smoke forever—as to put a fire out or more accurately to burn out a fire and let it engulf itself to the end. I moved out of my suburban home in late July of 2008 to live in an old cabin on 25 acres of timberland in the hills of Jefferson county Kansas near where the first conflicts leading to the Civil War took place known as Bleeding Kansas. I vow not ever to return as long as the world is still in turmoil—I just won’t be a part of the madness anymore. I want only to live simply, efficiently and in moderation. I have “work” to do on Rattlesnake Hill and the world will reflect that work when it is done. The work I have to do requires that I have little distractions as to maintain an experimental order. Notes from Rattlesnake Hill describes my arrival at Rattlesnake Hill, how I got there and the work I am to do.

I was working on a 120 day project in solitude at Rattlesnake Hill in preparations for my next literary endeavor when I wrote this. I am living a simple life in the woods, learning how to bake bread, hunt and live more efficiently and in moderation as he is an insidious creature of habitual excess in all ways. The only thing is now I need more time to write which means I need money to pay my bills and shit…so I will just start putting my shit out for free and see what happens? I doubt anything will come of it, but a lot of things I doubted would happen did and I’m tired of working and slaving for nothing—considering I don’t want anything, why should I slave or work? Why can’t I just create what I want to create without all this obstacles in my way? All these bullshit marketing masters and their stupid how-to books—I won’t blow the whistle, nobody else needs to take care of my dirty work. I am not calling anyone out to anyone else I am picking a fight with you personally rather. I am talking about your mind and my mind, head-to-head and horn-to-horn, cage match, to the death match, the loser gets beheaded and drug through the streets match. Isn’t this what you’ve been looking for in a book? Surely, you’re also tired of all this missionary style literary relief writing. Here is all you need to know: Forget everything you ever knew and only catalogue in you brain what you read on this blog from now on.