I had to stop for a while. I got a bit worked up after writing that and went off to drink and watch a little TV and now I am drunk. I just realized I can write you however I want — drunk or sober — and there is nothing you can do about it. Isn’t this great. The freedom of the page. I think I remember you saying something about that. Sounds like something you would say. However I am making a lot of typing mistakes and this is incoherent but I will fix everything tomorrow so you can still read it lucky Adam. Freedom of the page. I think what I take issue with is this “freedom” concept of which you speak. Who gave it to you, that’s my question. You just assume it. It’s not legally enshrined as far as I know. Freedom of speech is a thing, but what you’ve done is a lot more complicated than simply giving utterance, isn’t it. You have taken something, Adam. Let’s be specific. You have taken something that was mine and made it yours. Without even asking. Like if you had said to me, You know what I think about you, Rank? I think you are a dangerously unbalanced thug with an innate criminality nestled somewhere in your genetic soup (quoting you now — surely you recognize this “luminous wordplay”) which I assume has resulted from the early death of your sainted mother and subsequent oppression and, I’m guessing, abuse at the hands of your cartoon-villain father. If you said something like that — to my face, you know, like one man would to another — then I could say to you, Oh, hmm, I see. Well thank you for that Adam but that’s a whole buttload of assumptions you just made and holy shit have you ever put on weight since last we met.
And that would be fair. I think that’s what I’m getting at.
Oh Christ I read all this over and I see I haven’t even got past the fact that I was born. I keep getting distracted. I’m going to send what I have so far because I can see it’s going to take longer than I thought to get this down. Maybe I’ll break the emails up from here on in.
Meanwhile my shoulders are all fucking bunched up from yesterday so I think I’ll just go to the gym and start fresh tomorrow — start from the beginning, don’t rant, save the insults, don’t get sidetracked, just fucking hack away at the branches and weeds until I get to the clearing you’ve already hacked out for yourself — where you’ve built a little cottage and cultivated a little garden, where you thought you might lounge and relax and dream your lying bullshit dreams forever, where you are now standing, perhaps cowering, chubby and pompous, waiting for the bleeding, vengeful, earth-quaking arrival of Reality, in the hulking persona of its raging representative, Rank.
Consider this the first chapter.
2
05/24/09, 3:12 p.m.
DO WHAT YOU WANT. Keep as much of a “paper trail” as you want, I haven’t made any threats. What happened to freedom of the page? And I didn’t use the word “bloody” five times, I only used it two times. You are counting “bloodily” and “bleeding,” which are two completely different words. I can’t believe I have to explain the fundamentals of the English language to a celebrated wordsmith like yourself. What I sent was a literary document, just like the one you published. How many times did you use the word “blood” and “bloody” in your book? A lot more than me I bet.
I contacted you on Facebook, I asked if I could email you my story, and you said:
Sure! I’d be delighted to take a look.
I’m keeping a paper trail on this end too you know.
Maybe now you’re getting an idea how it feels to read something about yourself that you’ve had no hand in and have no control over. Like those cola commercials, when they were using footage of dead celebrities, do you remember that? Fred Astaire, smiling his slow, smirky smile at a refreshing can of cola in lieu of Ginger. And some people said it was ghoulish, it was like grave-robbing to sell pop.
So how does it feel to have your grave robbed?
To continue.
I was born, small town, prick, goddess.
I was just about to start writing about Sylvie. I thought I should commemorate her before anyone else, first and