Let’s just keep on keeping on, shall we?

Before I forget–

Yesterday, my best friend in the Universe, Valerie in Brooklyn, finally got word from her doctor regarding her heart problem. (Can you believe it took that long??)

But — YES– it’s looking like those two near-heart-attack episodes she had were caused by a bad reaction to a prescription drug she was taking (which she stopped taking a couple months ago, switching to herbal supplements from a Naturopath instead).

So when she went in for the heart surgery, the doctor couldn’t perform it only because he found nothing wrong…

So. Yay, gang. What a relief. (In fact, when I spoke to her on the phone, she sounded better than she’s sounded in a really long time. Another score for supplements over pharmaceuticals.)

In other news, though —

I am home “sick” today. Actually, I’m home trying not to be extremely depressed.

I was in such a bad state yesterday, which I couldn’t snap out of, that by early afternoon, I called the Agency and took today as a sick day. This gave them plenty of time to find someone to cover my shift with my favorite 95-year-old Japanese man today.

I was doing fine yesterday until I started researching/making notes for my contribution to the tribute to M. Christian.

It wasn’t so much that I got depressed over Chris’s death, but the anthology I was skimming through, from 24 years ago, was filled with erotic work by terrific writers that I used to work with all the time — back before the global economy and self-publishing technology completely decimated the traditional literary erotica market — the anthology also included work by Bill Brent and Michael Hemmingson, writers whom I was very, very close with for many years, who are both also dead and have been for a while. And all three of us worked with M. Christian a lot.

It just got to me. How much fun we used to have. How intense it used to be. The incredibly great work that writers, filmmakers, painters, poets were doing back then in the erotic arts. And because I was a publisher, editor, and a multi-media producer (and a constant marketer beyond your ability to comprehend), I got to work with ALL of them, from all over the world, in one capacity or another. (This was not traditional porn; this was art created by people, internationally, who were trying to make a statement about the eternal effects of Eros.)

It was so different from what most people create nowadays. Just because technology has just gone on in this unstoppable direction. Everything changed. You can’t go back. Perhaps people don’t even want to go back.

Well, it exhausted me, thinking about how Time is galloping on. It all went by so fast.

And since I couldn’t find a vacant spot to lie down on, on my own bed, because it was filled with many peacefully sleeping cats, instead, I went downstairs and laid down on the couch in the family room. Tried not to think about suicide. Tried to focus on people (and animals) who are counting on me to not die right now. Tried to take a nap.

But this change of location wound up having its own emotional perils because so many of my beloved books are down there in the family room–

And for some reason, I kept getting up from the couch, grabbing a book that I hadn’t read in decades, and would then start flipping through it.

Only to be confronted by the works of writers from the 20th Century — writers I loved but never knew personally; writers who all pushed the boundaries and paved the way for writers like me; who all knew each other and who were all published by a truly legendary publisher who was not afraid to take monumental risks to get the writers’ works out there–

Barney Rosset, 1922 – 2012

And all of those writers are dead now, too, and have been for a long time.

There it was again — Time galloping away.

I consider myself so fortunate to have met Barney Rosset when I was a writer in NYC, and to have been published by one of his imprints (not Grove Press, though), before he permanently retired (Blue Moon Books published the mass market edition of Neptune & Surf, but Barney was semi-retired by then).

And when I founded the Erotic Authors Association, to get better recognition (and better pay) for erotic authors worldwide, once a year, we gave out actual awards (engraved plaques), for Lifetime Achievements, and I was truly honored to be able to give out our first one to Barney Rosset and his legendary Grove Press.

And then when the Federal Government back then made it excruciatingly clear that if I kept up with the erotic literature stuff on the Internet, then I was going to prison –like, you know, they were going to frighten me or something…

Well, they frightened the fucking fuck out of me. And the moment I got home from my day of testimony in Supreme Court in Philadelphia, after having very, very politely explained to the Judge that erotic literature was not illegal (and even though the Judge sided with us and we won), I stepped down from the Erotic Authors Association and turned it over to other people who ended up trashing the whole venture and turning it into a porn site…

Anyway.

First I picked up Lost Words; The Final Journals of William S. Burroughs, which Wayne had bought me for Christmas in 2000. Edited and with an introduction by James Grauerholz (who had also just fucking died on New Year’s Day). But I couldn’t get past the part where James described how eccentric William was about cats — he’d had SIX of them. I have almost three times that many…

So I picked up another book. This one, by Jim Thompson. Wayne had bought that one for me, also. But when I saw how Wayne had inscribed it:

Well, that sort of devastated me because I didn’t recall Wayne ever having loved me at all. I was under the impression we’d been “really good friends” throughout our marriage and for the 19 years since our divorce….

There’s that pesky Time thing again.

But, at last! I picked up The Selected Letters of Jack Kerouac: 1940-1956.

599 pages(!!) of letters he’d written in the space of only 16 (!!) years, BEFORE he got famous(!).

And immediately, I was lost in something so beautiful. So full of fun and enthusiasm and passion. The book is just beautiful. The pages are brown and fragile now. But, wow, all of the Time that galloped out of Jack Kerouac’s life are still preserved there. And I read that for quite a while.

And I felt a little better about Time, because it comes for everybody. It’s simply part of being here.

And I calmed down.

And I felt like I should go back upstairs, do some yoga, listen to another lecture in James Tabor’s new course, “Christianity Before Paul” and be here now, and get my head back on straight.

And as luck would have it, just as I got back up to my cat-filled room, Sandra called and we had an extremely productive chat about both the TV series we’re developing, and the screenplay version of “Tell My Bones: The Helen LaFrance Story”. And you know, at least she and I both agree, we are in the final quarter of the 4th Act. We have to do our very best work now.

************

And then I started listening to this last night. A free audio book. The guy reading it, Andy Marin, does a really terrific job. It’s been about 40 years since I read The Subterraneans, so it feels like it’s brand new, which is kind of a thrill: