By the touch of gray hair and a swift car that bustled down the street, I was in front of a mall, a large one. I was delivering an order of pizza to this woman who was inside the mall. It’s crazy; she already has so many options to quench her subdominal thirst with, but why? Why did she need something that is not under air conditioning? I told you, humans are too much sometimes, but I forgive her because she was a beauty, a beauty that has nothing to be said, and she gave me a tip; tipping poor people was something else, but tipping the next Bukowski was not good. Not good at all, like it was a pettiness of my own circumstances.

Anyway, she was pretty. I wanted to give her some humble request of keeping the change, but I was only collected down to a thought. I cycled throughout the afternoon and got ready to attend one seminar held by a writer who is supposedly going to tell us, fill us all with great depth and findings, with great sincerity and with great ambiguity about all of his secrets, all of his findings, all of his strengths and weaknesses that took him nowhere, only got him an audience who wants the same thing, to become a man among men. What I wanted at this moment? Was to actually be a writer. I started to like something for the first time.

Let’s see...

I wore the only pant I had and a simple yellow-colored t-shirt, combed my hair, and put in some powder that made me look like a sunshine flower with no grass left. Ahh well, I walked this time, had nothing in my mind, and saw people, all coming out of their prayers from a mosque, all happy and chatting about their days and the days that will come and about the days that they don’t want to see and about the days that were already a distant memory and formulizing some concept of happening and putting God as the epitome of the course that they took.

Ahh well. I got inside a big auditorium of various seats, all waiting patiently for people to fill in. And all the people were outside the gate inside a smoking area, with packs of cigarettes readily available for the thinking minds who could spare us with their findings and a nickel worth of advice. It was like an individual party, individuality, and people trying to attain their individual voices who all had questions, and these questions were haunting them. They didn’t talk with each other much; it’s a writer thing, I thought, and I smoke my own cigarette without talking much either. I liked it this way, a silent prayer to know whether it will be all worth it, whether the decision to suffer within themselves will be all worth it, whether it is the thing that I was born for. It’s the same fucking questions, but these all were attached to a single point of dart, which was success, which was already killing them for not making it.

These were all rich people with a rich background with a wallet behind their back pockets; they were neither middleclass nor poor folk waiting around in the bushes. I thought of seeing one eye that blazed with fire that wanted something more or was searching for something more, but all was an insecure ass with big bellies still in their 20s and crying inside to get in. And we got in. We seated and took all the empty chairs; the race for the front seat was enormous; they ran like they had never run before, and Harold was in the seats to be in the front eyes for the writer to see. I took the back one as usual.

Just back enough to listen to this fucker talk. And he was late—quite late—a busy man whatsoever who had to bring the country to enlightenment with his words. And he came with his shiny suit that was made readily only for him—a skin-tight suit that could be worn when going for a swim; it was that tight. He has been taking care of himself to show the world of his differences, but he didn’t interest me much. He had this old man condescending aura that had his trauma all covered up by the world; the world was good to him, and so he became a good man in return for it. And everyone present there wants to become like him. No one in the room has it to become a writer; all was mixed feelings with untouched condolences of their own suffering. I waited for him to speak.

He gave an appreciation speech to make us all welcome; it was basically for him, for him to humble himself to write even more. All Japanese culture is too much looking into his own art as the savior. But he had an articulated stance that made us all see pictures and thoughts that were otherwise indulged too much into our own loss. He saw Europe and the development towards the literary phase of letting through new artists to make their voices heard. He wants to make India the same as the world, to open new gates for the upcoming new artists where the world is waiting for new art to sore through pages of obscure lines of sentences to make the psychological mind all feed with ground beef and a dessert to keep on making more obscure lines of sentences. But the world needed nothing more than a beer and a woman by his side, that’s all. He had a lot of sex there with the English women; he was quiet about it though, really quiet about it, and made all noble statements, which made the whole room all elevated with goodness. Then there was this Q and A. Everyone had the same question,

Whether I am the next writer of the century or not?

Of course not; you can never be. Have you seen yourself all pathetically begging for the obvious desperation, you dumb fucks? You are less than the street beggar that took and took and only gravely died of not knowing the answer to a simple question. You motherfuckers.

How much will I make if I become an artist? consumed their mind and the fame. They all wanted to stand on that stage to show their faces all turning blue with shyness that they knew—they knew it all along when they were children—that they were the chosen ones, that the world specifically made it this way so that their voices would be heard through the gates of hell and the symphonies of the divine, which only had time to make them the special ones. I laughed and thought of Jessica. How was she? How was her father? Is he not dead yet? That old man is still smoking cigars even though he has become a retard, but nicotine still had a hold on him. Ahh, well. The talk went on and I was too bored to even listen, and the secret was revealed shortly after. I write 6 hours a day; I write and write and write, and I masturbate after I write. It turns out all good when I stop writing, and then I write some more, and then I rewrite what I have written and rewrite some more until it all makes sense of the world which I live in.

Surely you too can do this; it's not easy; it's hard work; writing is hard work; you have to take your ass to the typewriter every day to be lucky, and I got lucky, but luck doesn’t have anything to do with it; I had hard work by my side. He babbled a little more, which made me tired per say, and I got out, took a train ticket, and went out to a station that was named after an important person who stood the time of his day. Ah, this motherfucker too was looking down on me. I will show you; just wait a moment. I saw a park filled with hugging people; love was in the air; a body touched another body, and both were happy just because they felt a flesh touching the skin of longing, weak, or simply weakness otherwise of their lonely existence. I lied down all alone in the middle of all this romance and saw women and the love for each other for keeping a simple day a need for something else to happen, and their men looked at me all venomously. I was ready for a fight; just one hint and it’s all on.

Women and the world and the soul, and in it you live someday and die another day; in it your own lack for giving it your full makes it all the more senseless to live, and in it you make it harder to grab a hold of your own templates of various notions that are killing you to be inside a beauty that doesn’t call you; it calls someone that exists in the dimension that has never been touched before.

Amen.