Calling Collect from the Holiday Inn

UN. The weather currently being experienced in Seattle is like one of those amazing pie pranks where you get hit with the first, laugh, get hit with another, laugh some more, then start wondering what you did to get the person mad at you. It has long passed the realm of being absolutely hilarious, and now all anyone really wants out of life is to get home without stitches, eat greasy Oriental leftovers and watch Lo-Definition episodes of ‘Lost’. I’m speaking only for myself, of course – although I hope not. I can’t do this anymore. Sit here like some paraplegic in some retirement community far from the baits of civilization. I don’t have four-wheel drive and I need to get down my fucking hill.

DEUX. Due to Thanksgiving, the weather psychoses and the instructor’s perpetual series of ‘girl troubles’, the original schedule for bartending school has been nipped-and-tucked to the point where I don’t know which day is Christmas. (Just for the record, I wouldn't in any other circumstance either) Anyhow, I should have my certificate in the next two weeks. I still haven’t decided what kind of bartender I should be. I mean, the people who make the best tips tend to have very unambiguous personas like ‘Rob the Hot Ex-Marine” or ‘Nina the Tattoo Nymph’ or ‘Jeremy the Guy Who Can’t Do Math But Who Can Make My Grey Goose Martini Out Of This Five Dollar Bill". If you can help me make any specific choices as to what bartender I should be, I would appreciate it very much.

TROIS. Okay, I’m sure I’m not the only one to notice, Foo'ZZ, it’s already December! (Well, a day away from it, but really, what’s the difference?) God-oh-God-oh-God. How the hell did this happen? Where am I? Why am I not rich and having recurring three-way sex with Fredric Michalak and his Belgian waffleboy? And why is my hairline all the way back there? (REPEAT X 12)

QUATRE. I would have liked to have finished at least one substantial project this year. Like Woody Allen. (Who manages to pull it off successfully by being Woody Allen, even when the rest of us say: “Stop making movies where you lie in bed with girls that you'll never get to spread in a hundred years.”) But I mean, going back as far as childhood, I could always trust myself to meet certain goals at the end of each year. Goals that gave something to show for the passing of time. A year well spent. Whether it was a popsicle-stick fortress or a forged attempt at heterosexuality or reading a three-decker volume of poetry that I only pretended to understand, I finished it. Yes, back then, my ass had ambition! (It still does, I think. It just doesn’t like to look in the mirror.) So when the ball drops, we will call 2006 by its name: The Year of Attempted Wisdom and Other Inconveniences. Until then, we still have thirty-one days to go.

CINQ. Well, at the beginning of next year, I begin recording a song cycle I started back in April called Blind Bastard’s Banquet. As it stands, the songs I have finished thus far contain, I think, some of the most musically and lyrically successful work I’ve ever done. The songs are radical, introspective, funny, chromatic, sexy, social, subterranean, etc. I am very proud of what I’ve done and it’ll be very excited to see what comes of this. The objective, ultimately, is to perform them either as a standard ten-song repertoire or with an incidental character-driven narrative. I’m performing these songs on my own, or with a band, should the opportunity present itself. Now as I write this, I just realize how incongruous this is with the paragraph that came before. I should really stop undermining the work that I put into the things that are supposed to give my life any value. In fact, I should stop undermining any of the other attempts I have made this year with the purest of intentions. This will be my new half-baked New Years Resolution. To stop this. Or at the very least, cut back. Because when all the hair is finally pulled out, you realize that the undermining is a strategy to stop moving. My insurance won’t cover its victory.

It’s 3:52 and I’m so feeling the crowding of wishes and static.

A speech that Faulkner gave upon receiving the Nobel Prize in Stockholm on December 10, 1950.

I feel that this award was not made to me as a man, but to my work - a life's work in the agony and sweat of the human spirit, not for glory and least of all for profit, but to create out of the materials of the human spirit something which did not exist before. So this award is only mine in trust. It will not be difficult to find a dedication for the money part of it commensurate with the purpose and significance of its origin. But I would like to do the same with the acclaim too, by using this moment as a pinnacle from which I might be listened to by the young men and women already dedicated to the same anguish and travail, among whom is already that one who will some day stand here where I am standing.

Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat.

He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed - love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories without hope and, worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands.

Until he relearns these things, he will write as though he stood among and watched the end of man. I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last dingdong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet's, the writer's, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.