Status Updates From The True Confessions of an ...

You grow rich with the richness of the very poor; the smallest sign of life from outside becomes a gift to be cherished. You see things for what they are, stripped of your own overbearing presence. No king was ever blessed as you are. You learn how appearances fit together. About illusion. About space and you yourself just one vibrating pretence among many. That you outline absence by placing and fixing anything.

They recognized my way of fondling the pipe as someone else might have recognized my way of handing a pen or my way of stuttering into a tape recorder. These are indelible fingerprints of fugacious identity. There is no 'I', there is no name, there is no identity. But there are unchanging manifestations, habits, a hulk, a carcass, recognizable. There is a sore thumb. The cause has disappeared, the symptoms remain.

“In the dark I can just perceive the faintly pale outline of a sheet of paper. And I would start writing. Like launching a black ship on a dark sea.”

“Don’t ask me any questions. You don’t have to. You will not be able to stop the answers in any event. The black vomit must be spewed out.”

“Freedom is not knowing where to stop. It is a gargantuan appetite; it is a need to burn clean, with whatever is spicy and hot, the taste of dullness which has encrusted your memory and your appetite; it is the unquenchable thirst; it’s the need to absorb, to take, to grasp, to experience, to renew and to drink, because it is simultaneously the necessity to deaden the nerve ends.”