I'm feeling out of it in a party that gets me nothing but a fresh lay and some laughs - if that. Acting like someone who is like someone else who belongs to a particular class, and playing the role... We don't have to define rules of behavior to live freely.

Some people must always appear to be responsible citizens, like politicians, just as other types of people will laugh at each other if they act responsibly at all, like jazz musicians, poets and painters. The roles we imagine have very little to do with what each individual actually does and tries to do...

People should talk to each other - no matter what kind of image system they heat the security blanket with... I still don't want Fulbright or Canada Council grants: I hate the idea of depending on competitive approval systems and the government - just so I can pretend to be a "professional." Do I want to turn out just another puffed-up ingrate-on-the-make? So, I'm indifferent to all forms of technocracy and bureaucracy associated with the arts. The focus of the art bureaucracy isn't on the content of art, but on who you are and who you know. Your grubby little CV is all that counts. Forget about what you actually wrote or painted - you are only a pro if you can get somebody to give you money and a name with it. Some of today's finest living artists are left out in the cold because their national art systems are too staid and conventional, and everybody who gets involved stays involved because they are allowed to: usually, such systems are usually interested in "training" new artists only. It becomes another safe middle class job... But what about the born genius who needs no training? How can such individuals fit into an official system which panders to the average, to mimicry, to the schooled - the unremarkable? What is the literary genius to do when he sees nobody wants his work because everyone is fixated upon movies and pop music only? Perhaps the official university/government system arose because nobody really wants art anymore. Yet, a tragedy arises: the pure creativity that inspires art is obstructed by a system that demands the artist get approval for a creativity that doesn't understand why! What absurdity! Approval from who? For what? Why place the author in a university, and force him or her to teach what can't be taught? What for? Fine artists have never needed to ask for anyone's approval! The best art is spontaneous and unplanned - it springs from the imagination of sensitive and capable souls, like a seed full of themes finally grows into a full flower. Meanwhile, technocracy only serves to collectivize an easily shared compliance that really undoes creative originality: quite unwittingly, spontaneity and imaginative freedom are undermined... Not only that, but the technocracy is so limited in its resources that the same artists get let in over and over again, and almost nobody new gets a chance to have their "national" career. So, if you refuse to participate in these unfair and impersonal public systems, and you can't bear the mass mind of hollywood and pop-music and genre-publishing - then that's it - you cease to exist... People will go out of their way to ignore your work;, at best, the few people who may be interested will have to rely on old, second hand reports of your life and work. Maybe the left out and the dispossessed - those of us who are unafraid of poverty, ridicule and solitude - perhaps we alone have a chance to write fine novels.

But the point is: rich or poor, city or country, that doesn't matter to art. Keats was a hick and Rimbaud, a filthy peasant boor. Look at Dostoyevsky: after rebelling against those in power, and imprisoned for it, Dostoyevsky had no choice but to become a sycophant to ideals and powerful people he didn't really believe in; consequently, he became a frustrated and monstrously bigoted xenophobe. Of course, the perpetual mental anguish resulting from the forced departure from his original instincts into a prison camp with ordinary folk, and later set free to return home again, all that subsequently led to several original insights about the transformation of modern Christianity, the Russian character and the true nature of all humanity.

Yes, but the truest sincerity comes from eternal vagrancy, the waiting to be damned, the wish for redemption, the hunger for good fortune and the lust for a love that you never had. Oh yes, I'm a slut-fucker too... All women would be sluts if they let themselves go. But men won't set them free! You have to wear a label: a slut/whore, or a wife/mother - but you can never ever just be free!

You icy mothers, you slimy double-dealers - all of you who imagine the life you live is the life you deserve. Do you actually pretend to know what you are talking about, too? You just let in your kids! But as for true artists? What's that? We're over. We crawl and race, biding time to bolster pride. You've got your nod, he's got his signal... Expensive classed-in sleep - better get it. You need that slumber-party, it is well-earned..! You still think the nature of humanity is to compete, and dumb survival is the best we'll drum up!? But animals are the only creatures that compete to survive! People have to work together before we thrive!

No more dough than for a bottle of something tasty enough to save my soul: nothing's keeping me behind but your need to steal my cash... You must forget my memory, sister, before you can love like thunder again... I won't be coming back home tomorrow, either. I don't like your fake mercy, I don't want your insipid patriarchy of application forms... I just don't need it.

But I don't mind being born - although I'm unwanted. My spill is worth my old man's seed. How many of you really are bastards, and don't even know who your old man is?! The twentieth century of irresponsibility is over. The memory we have for morality has never been more fake or put-on than ever before now. You don't believe me!?

I walk circles round the market - without buying a thing. I can't play the guitar. You can, sure... I don't mind - please, enjoy it... I'm slower than the snail on the path? Yes, I'm pretty thick, aren't I? The dons think I'm a dunce, a vulgar boor, no doubt about it... Question remains, why did she need it? I don't know. Fucked too many guys and grew up in a Catholic town or something. Women can scream their guilt away. Really, when are we going to understand that a girl should fuck because she likes to do it? Why else? We're human beings, not rabbits. Why should I bother to ask God to forgive my pleasure? Priests are dinosaurs!

You know how crazy it is today: zombie Italian bunnies hire killers to put-down their much-hated fathers. Why? Maybe so they can afford Majorcan dungeons of their own: keeping up with the idle is so important to today's demi-dames... I know you don't care, but I have a theory about fashion: people who live by appearances are likely to be unhappy because they can't simply be themselves: they're always worried about what other people think about them. Blahhh. They just caught that ol' market scold; but no, that cold really can't touch the safely dead poet! Those of us confined to our little middle class cash scenario, the iddy-biddy profs, the creative writing instructors, the goofy starlets, the hack manques: we all are forced to find some "safer way" to reach art - exactly by not being artists ourselves! So you see how it is..! Thick TV writers and formula novelists, editors with too many rules and presumptions, and slack arts technocrats with big salary and juicy expense accounts. Go ahead and study the dead revolutionary till your blood turns blue sourpuss sister; but don't you dare try to be a poet yourself - because you'll be alone - with nobody to respect your poverty and absence...

Clean up the Mediterranean? Why bother? Buy a new car instead. You're so inconsiderate as to throw your trash everywhere but where she belongs - in my bed! Another inappropriate tangent: naked, her pink nipples are pert, and she's moist-muffed, lying nude on what little is left of the beach at St. Tropez... Ignorance is the deadly force of fear; while new knowledge alone lets us take heart... It's true.

Yes, wait for reincarnation as a splendid multi-orificed member of the machine-bank, processing 1000 orders simultaneously... Lend me your mythic fibre, connect me to that fluid crystal tree... The computer of the future - it can't be imagined yet... A lazy louse of a French poet called Paul well-predicted that we'd touch and feel images within seconds of wishing to see them... Software designers and hardware engineers have truly mastered the art of wish fulfillment. (But all the girls are waiting outside the network parlor, wondering when the girlie-boys are going to come fuck 'em...)

You don't have to believe a word I say. I feel quite good enough about myself to do nothing but wait to get fat and even slower than I already am... Maybe I'll have an aneurysm, since one ear is beet red, and the other, pale as cream cheese. ...Still, I'm sick in bed, sick in bed... Is your diet a terminal one? Can you raise your leg higher than your eyebrow? Play it again for the 4,000th time, dope star. Inspiration began when you were alone then was squashed by the group, the good-for-nothing corporation. But the cheques and TT's never stopped pumping did they? So why break-up - after all?

Tomorrow makes me want to live, sure it does. Another day to lie in bed writing my road journal, fast and uncluttered, not so elliptically unfocused as this hard-to-read shit. The reason I'm writing is simple... I don't want to be a jesus freak, a nazi, a deadbeat - not any more than I want to end up another cramped little bully-boy at the artichoking uni - a fakey form-imitator. Instead, I'll be a stupid zombie working for a big dickhead corporation - and I'll be lucky if I escape with pennies and brain intact enough to write even one half-good poem, let alone three novels...

Anyway, I'd rather be a nothing, a no name. A somebody-only-for-myself. You won't ever read any fake jam spread all over me in some dim dunce celebzine... Yeah, yeah, yeah! Yeah, yeah, yeah! Come on! Come on! Hey, we got too much "come on" for so many years now! I want to forget this trivial stupid civilization!

Put it this way and leave it alone forever: I'm not you. You're you and the world isn't your idea of it. The world is beyond ideas. Science gets closer than your ideas. So, fuck your foundationalism, screw your dispensationalism, your insane objectivism, your old fascism, your blind anarchism - all so stupid fanaticism, no-trustism and finger-pointingism... So-so speechlessism wins, yet again - because because - you just can't cook up some all-new-gism-ism exciting enough to make some dummy pay you for giving it a new name!

~ Miguel comes back from the bank again. Is this the second or the third day of overdue waiting? I'm losing my career-track! Afraid to tread upon naval snakes? Yes. Behold the official birthright of the fascist prince of paramilitary-ville. He's dumber than us all - and they stamp his ilk out by the dozen. So, what you gonna do about that, peace-lover?

I'm waiting for the pork fat to melt. I'm still a fool? Okay, so it won't ever melt. We're betrayed by our aptitude for paying attention to prime concerns and then jailing ourselves, in service to wishful lip service... Boredom and formality - not really any need for practical plans and private intentions made public, not at all - just a cloying habit for abstraction - that's what drives us into the mean bureaucratic go round. We have no choice but to subscribe to the bureaucracy because we can't think of anyway else how to do it. Nothing to do but fuck your boss up the ass. Oh, but if you only had the chance to sister, you would!

We the peasants protest - because we always have to pay more to live than we can ever earn back! So doesn't that really mean that we can only just afford to pretend that we care, too, Mr. President? Moguls don't live in the same world as the man-in-the-street. Choose your narrow stand Mr. Social Man - and babble meaninglessly. You're rich and you don't have to be in touch with any reality at all! Let's all work together to help preserve the unbalanced structure, let's make sure global inequality, oppression and injustice goes on! Pretend that the hungry poor can afford the bad news, too!

I'm another leper, wondering why the heroic and lousy bastards of the world have no obligation but to say that they still care - without any risk - since none of their rich asses can end up in a jail cell? It's easy to promise a springtime for humanity, but when's it coming? I have so little to give you - only thoughts. Maybe thoughts can inspire a desire to act... But if you were to follow my example, you'd end up in some jail, kids.

A laughably ignominious hypocrisy, a frustration that all poets, philosophers and politicians suffer together. We end up realizing that all we have are small small thoughts, dreams and words. Sometimes our words happen to be wise and beautiful. But "reality" assumes its own shape and seldom does it do what we want it to... Then think of reality like this: humanity is reality. You are we and we are they. The pronouns end in I... We are you. We have to be stronger than wishing. That's the key to reality: action isn't planned as we imagine it ought to be. Inspiration is a gift that gives to talent the magic of speech and lyric song. What else do you need to know? I'm never coming back.

Time doesn't begin for us. I'm not going to claim innocence ever again. I'm not innocent, but I'm not damned either. I'm still sick in bed.

Miguel tries, "You should go there. Talk, get your money."
"But he hung up on me. He was angry, a crazy Chinaman. Not a nice mild-mannered Tibetan."
"Just go - try."

He's right. Over the phone, the tour boss guy did admit that Tuhbten really is slaving for him out there in the wilderness. But it's a matter of only fifty U.S. bucks. Money is smaller than us, believe me! Okay, money is bigger than us when we don't have any. But my anger is small and insincere, too. All right, I'm going to give the bastard a try... Just to see what happens. The market is driven around the corner, and I haven't caught up to it yet, and I'm not going to... The boss of the tour company Tuhbten works for keeps an office in the Grand Hotel. All the new tourist hotels are in the west part of Lhasa. A big driveway, a glitzy marble lobby. The desk clerk obligingly directs me to the great Hun's travel office.

So I go up and Mr. Flying Leap is in, and he sits behind a wood-grained mactac special with lockable drawers. He's talking on his phone to a potential client. His secretary is a young Tibetan woman. She looks terrified of her boss. Today, I will have a good chance to find out why.

As I listen to him speak to his customer on the phone, Mr. Leap sounds like a real gentleman, full of professional promise: he offers his services and extends his enthusiasms to a potential client, but he seems obliged to spend an awful lot of energy assuaging the usual doubts with which Westerners challenge their Chinese hosts and partners. It's a tiresome racial chore that all Asian businessmen must endure - only to develop sufficient trust. Flying Leap gets a trifle frustrated and takes a mild swipe at his client's alleged prejudices, and speaks quickly into the receiver, "I know you Americans don't like us Chinese, but..."

Mr. Leap is built on the defensive. He looks Mongolian, huge and husky, like a linebacker - very much the pugilist and killer. He wears a sharp crew cut. It doesn't take any sensitivity on my part to fathom that he won't be inclined to humble himself and cooperate with small fry like me...

Actually, I feel like laughing, but say, "Hello." Then, I test my nerves, "So, is Tuhbten back yet?"
"Not yet."
"I paid for that truck when he didn't have enough money."
"But he isn't back. I don't know his story. I have to talk to him first. How can I believe? You wait."
"But your company owes me 500. I have the I.O.U. we made at Saga town."
But he won't spare my contract even a single glance and says, "You know, your paper won't stand up in any court of law."
"But it isn't very much money."
"You come here to China and think things are the same as they are in America. But this is China and we don't do things like you do in America."

I get up to go, numb but not angry, yet. I turn and bite at his bait, "What kind of businessman are you - a good one or a bad one? This has nothing to do with China or America. Your company owes me."

He starts up, whips off his jacket, ready to attack. The secretary jumps back. She glances fearfully from me to him, him to me. Flying Leap rushes me back to the door, clenching his fists, ready to punch. He wants to scare me away for good and won't be afraid on his own turf. His best pals are probably army colonels and police chiefs. But I stand my ground, "What are you - a businessman or a monster?"

"Yaaarrrhhhh!" Musclehead rage doesn't have to be very articulate... He gets ready to punch me. I duck and dodge back. He's only faking, trying to frighten me away, and it's working... I shout the same thing, "Are you a businessman or a monster?!"

Then I see the hallway has filled up with tremulous Tibetan chambermaids wringing their hands, looking anguished and shaking their heads, wishing I would get out before my pretty face gets ruined.

Monster Mr. Leap really is much bigger than me and his penile brain needs neither language nor heart to process his chalky blood supply... So, I turn tail and walk out. I exit the lobby peacefully, as if nothing particularly bad has happened. Maybe I managed to bring the greedy bastard one step closer to a premature death by zealous rage and heart seizure. Oh well, I hope not. Live and let live. I'm in the past - what I say or do doesn't much matter...

Content to have my dumb old block still hanging on my shoulder, I walk outside and spy a group of middling Tibetan fellows. They squat on the sidewalk close to my bike. All of them wear very nervous smiles. I pause and lean over into their faces, smiling at them. I shake my head, punching my fist into the palm of my left hand... Fuck it!

That's done. Miguel laughs, figuring I should try to get the money again. I swirl a finger round the side of my head. It isn't worth it, now is it? (Believe me, one of these days I'm going to change the subject and write something new, even if you think I can't...)