We Thank YOU For Your Patronage
Usually I keep half an eye on the floor of my apartment for piles of cat vomit. It is always in those rare moments when I decide it's unnecessary that I put my foot (usually bare, occasionally stockinged) into a warm pile (or, somehow worse, a cold one.)
This is the kind of up-to-the-moment journalism that will no longer be available from Infant Tyrone. I've been thinking about this for a while now, and I think I am not Infant Tyrone anymore. Back when I started this foolishness (and apparently before I knew how the spellchecker worked) my plan for this space was essentially two-fold--
--write the same self-indulgent stuff I'd been putting in journal-type entries for years, but a lot more of it, and
--unlike my journal entries (or my books, for that matter) these would be "public".
Public in this situation being very different from "published", since I was still just writing self-gratifying nonsense, but like tearing out the pages from the notebook as I went and leaving the sheets on the seats of city buses or park benches. It gave me a little thrill, a sort of exhibitionist frisson. You have to understand-- I've written by now like six books. And I have some kind of paralyzing phobia about letting them out, which makes them seem like those crippled genetically-doomed little over-bred dogs that certain rich crazy old people carry around. Dogs are meant to run around and roll in mud after rainstorms and chew up dead things they root out of the bushes, and puke them back up, and then roll around in that for a little while. These novels, I should have shoved them out into the muddy decaying world at some point, but now it's too late, they are pampered little narcissistic mirrors that couldn't live out on Ashland Avenue for like five minutes. So writing stuff and just lobbing it out there-- even into the often-echoless void that is the internet-- felt like a wild thing for me.
Of course, that's a wildly sheltered and vanilla version of the internet. I was never doing this for attention, exactly. I understand that there are like a billion pictures of penises and at least 3 billion breasts on the internet-- what some usually-drunk laborer in Chicago thinks about his favorite comics, comedy albums and post-modern novels is silt on the ocean floor of the information ocean. It was more in the spirit of a conversation I remember having with a friend (who is getting married next week, coincidentally) in junior high school. His question was this: if two people play chess or checkers or Risk against each other over and over for like ten years, are they then really good players, or what? Because if you are ever only butting heads with the same head, how slick are your moves really going to be? When some new person shows up and like immediately takes over Kamchatka and the Indies and a big chunk of South America and you look at the board thinking "I cannot see what you possibly could be planning in this game..." and then they proceed to destroy you. Do you follow me? Here is the simple translation: I wouldn't know if I was writing even made any sense to other human beings at all (forget about good or bad reviews) until I actually showed it to them.
Hence my insistence on as much anonymity as I could manage. I didn't want this too be about my real-life friends or co-workers reading about what I did or thought. I just wanted to know if I could conceivably communicate with strangers via the written word. I, the flesh-and-blood person (who is not a short black guy, fyi) shouldn't enter into it at all. I met a guy once, a poet who was to be a long-time friend, and the first day we met each other we left the "happening" we were at and went to the Del Rio in Ann Arbor and sat at the bar under dusty golden beams of the setting sun and he introduced me to the bartender: "This is ___, he's a great writer." He'd never read a word I'd written. I have a fear of being titled "writer"; some of the most worthless shitheels I've ever known went around calling themselves "writers."
Anyway. I'm not quitting writing. Nor am I giving up the internet. (Blockland needs me...) But between 2003 and 2008 some fairly heavy shit has changed, and I have trouble being Infant Tyrone any longer. Hell, I'm not even saying that I'm giving up lifting my handles from Pynchon books. I just wanted to leave a conclusive note here, so that there was no confusion. (I've had a couple LJ associates just drop entirely off the radar and it kind of alarmed me like are they dead? How would I even know? Are they maybe in prison or something? Do they need help?)
Anyhow. I want to thank all the Russian spambots who have found this LiveJournal and tried to colonize it. I'd like to thank the people I know in Real Life who I've met through this LiveJournal, who have refrained from blurting out "Infant Tyrone is just this _____ named ______, and I've met him and he's a total ____head." I'd like to thank some truly fantastic people I've met here whom I've never met in person due to finances or really heavy geographical hurdles but were at times closer to me than any flesh-and-blood friend. I'd like to thank all the much more consistent and non-neurotic LJrs who were patient and polite and friended me and responded to my drunken foo-fer-aw. And so, yeah. I'm not declaring bankruptcy but I am closing down this location. Pardon our dust.
This is the kind of up-to-the-moment journalism that will no longer be available from Infant Tyrone. I've been thinking about this for a while now, and I think I am not Infant Tyrone anymore. Back when I started this foolishness (and apparently before I knew how the spellchecker worked) my plan for this space was essentially two-fold--
--write the same self-indulgent stuff I'd been putting in journal-type entries for years, but a lot more of it, and
--unlike my journal entries (or my books, for that matter) these would be "public".
Public in this situation being very different from "published", since I was still just writing self-gratifying nonsense, but like tearing out the pages from the notebook as I went and leaving the sheets on the seats of city buses or park benches. It gave me a little thrill, a sort of exhibitionist frisson. You have to understand-- I've written by now like six books. And I have some kind of paralyzing phobia about letting them out, which makes them seem like those crippled genetically-doomed little over-bred dogs that certain rich crazy old people carry around. Dogs are meant to run around and roll in mud after rainstorms and chew up dead things they root out of the bushes, and puke them back up, and then roll around in that for a little while. These novels, I should have shoved them out into the muddy decaying world at some point, but now it's too late, they are pampered little narcissistic mirrors that couldn't live out on Ashland Avenue for like five minutes. So writing stuff and just lobbing it out there-- even into the often-echoless void that is the internet-- felt like a wild thing for me.
Of course, that's a wildly sheltered and vanilla version of the internet. I was never doing this for attention, exactly. I understand that there are like a billion pictures of penises and at least 3 billion breasts on the internet-- what some usually-drunk laborer in Chicago thinks about his favorite comics, comedy albums and post-modern novels is silt on the ocean floor of the information ocean. It was more in the spirit of a conversation I remember having with a friend (who is getting married next week, coincidentally) in junior high school. His question was this: if two people play chess or checkers or Risk against each other over and over for like ten years, are they then really good players, or what? Because if you are ever only butting heads with the same head, how slick are your moves really going to be? When some new person shows up and like immediately takes over Kamchatka and the Indies and a big chunk of South America and you look at the board thinking "I cannot see what you possibly could be planning in this game..." and then they proceed to destroy you. Do you follow me? Here is the simple translation: I wouldn't know if I was writing even made any sense to other human beings at all (forget about good or bad reviews) until I actually showed it to them.
Hence my insistence on as much anonymity as I could manage. I didn't want this too be about my real-life friends or co-workers reading about what I did or thought. I just wanted to know if I could conceivably communicate with strangers via the written word. I, the flesh-and-blood person (who is not a short black guy, fyi) shouldn't enter into it at all. I met a guy once, a poet who was to be a long-time friend, and the first day we met each other we left the "happening" we were at and went to the Del Rio in Ann Arbor and sat at the bar under dusty golden beams of the setting sun and he introduced me to the bartender: "This is ___, he's a great writer." He'd never read a word I'd written. I have a fear of being titled "writer"; some of the most worthless shitheels I've ever known went around calling themselves "writers."
Anyway. I'm not quitting writing. Nor am I giving up the internet. (Blockland needs me...) But between 2003 and 2008 some fairly heavy shit has changed, and I have trouble being Infant Tyrone any longer. Hell, I'm not even saying that I'm giving up lifting my handles from Pynchon books. I just wanted to leave a conclusive note here, so that there was no confusion. (I've had a couple LJ associates just drop entirely off the radar and it kind of alarmed me like are they dead? How would I even know? Are they maybe in prison or something? Do they need help?)
Anyhow. I want to thank all the Russian spambots who have found this LiveJournal and tried to colonize it. I'd like to thank the people I know in Real Life who I've met through this LiveJournal, who have refrained from blurting out "Infant Tyrone is just this _____ named ______, and I've met him and he's a total ____head." I'd like to thank some truly fantastic people I've met here whom I've never met in person due to finances or really heavy geographical hurdles but were at times closer to me than any flesh-and-blood friend. I'd like to thank all the much more consistent and non-neurotic LJrs who were patient and polite and friended me and responded to my drunken foo-fer-aw. And so, yeah. I'm not declaring bankruptcy but I am closing down this location. Pardon our dust.