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July 1, 2021 - One American - Chase Geiser
01:15:00
Joseph Massey | How To Be An American Poet Despite Cancel Culture | OAP #22
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Well, thank you for coming on.
I appreciate it.
I got your book.
Came in the mail today.
Oh, there it is.
And, you know, I was thinking, I'm surprised that you don't see a lot of criticism of poets given all of the paper that's wasted on each page.
It's not really very environmentally friendly.
Well, if the poetry is good, then it's justified.
If it's not, then it really is a crime against trees.
I've said before that 90, at least 98 to 99% of poetry that's published is an insult to trees.
It's tree murder.
Yeah, yeah, it's really a tragedy.
You know, it's funny.
I was talking to, I can't remember who it was I was talking to about this.
I think it was, I can't remember.
I just mentioned I do so many of these every week and I can't remember.
But we were, it was my buddy Eric talking about how since everything has gotten so political, no one's really talking about anything else.
And that was one of the reasons why I wanted to reach out to you is because, you know, I was interested in all sorts of things that were completely apolitical growing up and into young adulthood and even into college.
Like I was reading Kerouac when I was 14.
The Dharma bums totally changed my life.
Tristessa, I think, is his best work.
I mean, I went through that whole entire phase of being interested in poetry and making music when I was in high school and having sort of a general, a genuine pursuit of understanding the human condition.
I was having a human experience.
And now that everything's gotten so political, and necessarily so, I suppose.
I mean, it's a fought that needs, a fight that needs to be fought.
But it's really a shame because we're not talking about like what movies are moving or what art is resonating as a society.
We're just sort of bitching at each other.
And I thought maybe having you on would be sort of a re-inspiration to, or a way to kind of get back in touch because I think part of what it means to be American is to it's not just an innovative country in terms of technology and business.
It is those things, but it's also a great place of cultural development traditionally anyway.
And I don't know.
I just wondered kind of what you thought about that.
Yeah, well, I mean, most discussions of art or, you know, movies or books or whatever, painting, poetry, those discussions are severely inhibited by these politics that are so pervasive.
And to the point where, at least in poetry, and I'm sure in other mediums, other fields, but you really aren't permitted to be critical of anything, particularly if you're white and straight.
I know I'm probably going to get crap for that, but it's the truth.
You have to either say nothing or heap praise.
And that's all that's acceptable.
I've seen in poetry where, I mean, this is like a, I saw it coming.
And sure enough, it's here, where poets get bad reviews, bad as in critical.
You know, this book didn't really do it for me, or just, you know, critical in the sense of not just lavishing praise.
And they see it as a kind of violence.
They're offended by their bad reviews.
And they think they've terrified critics in that way.
I won't name it.
I won't name names because it's such a small world, the poetry world, but critics who were once considered major critics, kingmakers even was a word that was used to describe one critic, a kingmaker.
Well, the kingmaker was the editor of a very large national magazine that has a poetry section.
And they published a poem that when it first came out and the poet put it on Facebook, everybody loved it.
It got like 300 likes.
But within 24 hours, it was accused of appropriating culture in the sense that it was using African-American vernacular English, I think is the term.
So Ebonics.
It wasn't even Ebonics.
I mean, I come from outside of Philly and in Delaware.
I knew a lot of trailer park kids.
I lived in a trailer park.
People talked that way, white or black or Asian.
A lot of us were listening to rap music and it was just part of that slang was just part of the part of the nomenclature, right?
And this poem was about a homeless person, if I'm recalling correctly.
And then it spoke at points in the voice of this homeless person in a kind of slangy, urban kind of way.
But yeah, within 24 hours, it was called racist.
There were demands for apologies from the editors.
Take the poem down.
And so this Kingmaker critic completely caved to the pressure.
He appended, they didn't take the poem down, but they appended it with essentially a trigger warning.
And how they did that with Gone with the Wind on Disney Plus.
I'm surprised it's on there at all.
Yeah, it's on there.
Yeah, yeah.
There was a, and, you know, actually, they, funny thing is they, they got a bunch of bad press when they put that movie out.
Then they added a trigger warning, and it's since been removed, apparently, because my wife loves that movie, though.
I hate it.
And she watches it maybe annually.
And she's like, hey, they took the trigger warning away.
Well, they're different platforms, but it's like, okay, so Disney Plus, they took away Gone with the Wind, but did Netflix take away Cuties?
Oh, my God.
so we could watch that but we can't watch some and i i think gondolin's a terrible movie for lots of reasons um It's just boring as hell, and I was forced to watch it.
It's fucking boring, dude.
Yeah, it's way too, I mean, it just goes on forever.
I can't.
And I read your article, and I immediately regretted that I brought up that movie.
I'm sorry.
I didn't mean to.
Oh, no, that's okay.
I'm not triggered.
Triggered.
Yeah, I'm not triggered.
Even without that particular experience with the film, I still would hate it.
It's just boring.
Yeah, but just dislike.
Dislike.
There are so many better movies to watch, even from the time.
I mean, hell, it's fairly contemporary with, I think it's even the same year as Wizard of Oz.
Maybe I'm wrong, but Wizard of Oz is a far superior movie, in my opinion.
I agree.
And it's a classic.
There must be something cancelable, though, about Wizard of Oz.
I mean, it's just waiting to happen.
Yeah.
Yeah, I don't know.
That's a good question.
That would probably be a really good article, like a sarcastic sort of conceptual James, you know, James Lindsay, like trolling article about why we need to cancel The Wizard of Oz.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, like the cowardly lying, it's clearly insensitive to people who, you know, suffer from maybe it's post-traumatic stress disorder.
Yeah.
You know, it's coward shaming.
Yeah, it's coward shaming for sure.
But, you know, one thing that the Wizard of Oz gets right is it recognizes inherent white supremacy and that the man behind the curtain, the Wizard of Oz, is an old white dude.
That's right.
I think that at the time that would be the crux of the essay.
That's right.
That's right.
The big reveal.
It's all the strings are being pulled by an old white dude.
I mean, why not?
The patriarchy, they're just ubiquitous.
So the interesting thing to me about censorship, particularly with the arts, is that it's sort of always been a problem going back hundreds of years even.
And if you look at like Hal, for example, I know you had some correspondence with Alan Ginsburg.
How it was censored for sort of its explicit nature, right?
And, you know, we don't see censorship today for things that are explicit, but we see it for things that are offensive.
And that sort of shifted.
But censorship has sort of always been a problem for the arts.
And I think it's because maybe one of the purposes of art is to push buttons and cross lines that need to be crossed.
Well, you know, Lawrence Ferlinghetti passed away recently, the publisher and the man behind City Lights Books, the publishing house, and the bookstore.
And, you know, he went to court over Hal because he published it.
And, you know, the artists defended the artist who was being, they were attempting to pulp his books and to ban Hal.
And it was abhorrent to the poets within Ginsburg's milieu and just, I think, across the board at that time.
But now artists are censoring other artists.
They're ganging up to censor artists that they dislike for ideological reasons.
And that's terrifying to me.
And it's happening at a greater and greater frequency, it seems.
I know in the poetry world anyway, and just the literary world in general, it's almost becoming normal to cancel an author or a poet for whatever reason, to demand that their books be taken out of print, etc.
And that's the major difference.
Artists fought for other artists.
Artists fought for freedom of speech during that time period in the 50s.
But not anymore.
The whole idea of free speech is completely mangled and screwed up by, for lack of a better way of describing it, woke ideology.
I don't even know what's going on, man.
I mean, it's like it's happened.
It seems to have happened so quickly.
I mean, I can remember.
I'm not terribly old.
I can remember when poets were not censoring other poets and when they were actively.
It's got to be contemporary with social media.
It's got to have some sort of correlation there where it's just ideas and outrage can go viral so much more easily than they used to.
That's right.
That's right.
They're really afraid of becoming targets.
And so they line up and they shoot their neighbor so they don't get shot.
They tend to shoot the, and I'm speaking of the poetry world.
They tend to shoot the poets who are the most successful.
And it seems to make sense from an evolutionary point of view where the mediocrities gang up to take out the person who's seen as being in power.
But I can't see.
My mic working, so I have to reset it everyone.
Oh, it overheats.
It's that.
Yeah.
Well, I had it fired up all afternoon.
I forgot to turn it off after the fired up.
Yeah.
Oh, I just reset it.
Let's see.
Hold on a second.
Bear with me.
Sorry about that.
No, no worries.
There we go.
I'm going to just make sure it's plugged in.
One second.
I'll be right back.
And what I'm going to do while this is on.
Trying to read the spines.
You have the Urancha book.
Yeah.
Yeah, man.
I'm into all these esoteric shit.
I became a Freemason years ago and started reading all the weird stuff, actually about 10 years ago.
And there was a guy at my lodge that was really into that, and so I bought it.
Yeah, my dad's a Freemason.
Oh, cool.
Traveling man.
Yeah.
Yeah, he would get intoxicated and rattle off all the secret, all the little secret things he had to memorize.
Oh, shit, man.
That's too bad.
It's not supposed to do that.
I know.
I know.
At least you know.
Yeah, right.
The pretty vanilla stuff.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, I don't remember it.
I was very small, but yeah, all that stuff fascinates me, too.
The Urania book, just people, people want meaning in life, you know?
I'll tell you what, you'd probably love my bookshelf.
I got some good stuff if you're into esoteric, weird old wisdom.
The best one is Morse Dogma.
Who wrote that?
Albert Pike wrote it.
It's a Masonic book.
He was a Confederate general, actually.
And he basically was commissioned by the Supreme Council of Scottish Rite Freemasonry to scour the wisdom of the world for the lost degrees of Freemasonry.
And he wrote Morals and Dogma and put together the fourth through the 33rd degree rituals.
And he's like, these are them.
Yeah, I'm sure he massaged them and rewrote some of them.
So he didn't like rediscover the hidden scrolls.
It wasn't like, you know, national treasure or something like that.
But he basically did as much research as could be done in the late 19th century and tried to figure out what the hell happened to some of the old secret ceremonies.
Yeah, my dad's a 33rd degree Mason.
And then my cousin, his first cousins, I guess my third cousin, he was, I don't know what they, what do they call the leader of a lodge?
He was like the, he was the forceful master.
Yeah, yeah.
And he had a, he had a Masonic funeral and everything.
But I think because I grew up with being kind of Freemasonry adjacent, it hasn't been an area of a lot of interest.
Freemason adjacent, yeah.
Well, I don't, you know, some people think if you're if you even if you're just Freemason adjacent, you're you're like uh tainted by the Illuminati or whatever.
Yeah, I had a I had a guy with dreadlocks when I lived in Humboldt County and everyone's high all the time.
I wasn't.
And we visited this guy, my girlfriend and I, and she would, she would buy weed from him.
I wasn't interested.
I just went for the ride.
And I told this guy that my dad's a Freemason.
He pulled a sword on me and pointed it at my neck.
The dude pulled a sword.
He pulled out a sword.
Yeah.
He was terrified.
Oh, my God.
I don't know why.
I mean, I don't know if he thought I was some shape-shifting Illuminati person.
I don't know what he was scared of.
I'm not a master.
I don't know.
I don't know.
You know, obviously the Masons were heavily involved with the revolution in the United States.
And so I think that coupled with their advertised secrecy has just made certain conspiracy-minded people very skeptical and paranoid about the organization.
But ultimately, it's just a group of guys that get together and practice the degree work, which is highly symbolic about how to become a wiser person, how to become a better person, what it means to be a man.
And you're not allowed to talk about it.
And so everybody gets freaked out when they're like, hey, how come these kind of influencer people are like in this self-help group?
And they don't tell the world anything about what they do.
And it's just seems like a conspiracy.
If it's hidden, people will ascribe nefarious intent, you know, or it's shadowy.
It must be bad.
And you see that in a lot of the hype over so-called cults that's been going on.
Did you see the news about Allison Mack today?
I did, yeah, yeah.
And I think that whole situation is horribly sad.
Me too.
Yeah.
I think that's about as much as I can say that's articulate about it.
But clearly, those documentaries that have come out are such propaganda pieces.
The one documentary that comes to mind, I forget what it was called.
It wasn't the HBO one.
It wasn't the Vow.
It was this other one.
Seduced, yeah.
They were putting in clips of Jonestown, of all the dead bodies in Jonestown.
I'm like, Nexium had nothing to do with a Marxist death cult in the middle of the fucking jungle.
Keith Verneri for anything.
Yeah, you could say lots of things about Keith Vernieri, I'm sure, and people have.
But there was never any mention of group suicide or some kind of totalitarian rule.
I found that so abhorrent that they would use the deaths of those people in Jonestown.
Their survivors are still alive today.
People who actually survived Jonestown and then their relatives.
So to use that as leverage to convince people that this is some horrible, horrible cult.
It just goes to show how much overreach had to happen to make that organization look as horrible as possible.
Yeah, I think there are a couple of things that influence that.
The first thing, the first problem they had is similar to that of Scientology, though I think Scientology actually has real problems.
But when you have a bunch of celebrities or powerful people that are involved in any organization, it immediately draws attention.
There's incentive created for district attorneys, prosecutors, investigators.
Everybody wants to catch those guys, right?
It's like that scene in the Wolf of Wall Street when the FBI agent is on the boat with Leonardo DiCaprio's character, Jordan Belfort.
And he's like, I just can't wait till I take this boat back to the bureau.
And it's like the same thing I think happened with Nexium.
They thought everyone's ambition sort of to get these guys because they knew it was going to be such a huge story, coupled with the whole entire bullshit that was the Me Too movement.
Just sort of, it was just a bad, wrong place, wrong time for an organization like Nexium, in which you have a semi-controversial leader who happens to be sleeping with several of the members.
Yeah, bad place, wrong time for that group, and bad place, wrong time for journalism, because what counts as journalism these days is, I mean, so much of it is just activism.
And I heard a interview with, I think it's the Times Union.
It's the paper in wherever Nexeme's located in New York.
They were writing lots of stories about them.
I heard a podcast with him, and he was just so snarky, and it was clearly like making it very personal, you know, mocking like that they would play volleyball at night.
Like, why is that necessary?
You know, if they've committed these crimes, you're saying that they're very suspicious.
Why don't you just stick to facts?
Stick to those, you're journalists.
Aren't facts your thing?
But it's just, it's editorial commentary all the time.
And yeah, it's a sensational factor.
Nexeme has all the components.
Yeah, and what I don't understand about it is, you know, it's sort of like a Marilyn Man or a Charles Manson thing, rather, where, you know, Charles Manson never actually murdered anybody, right?
But he was convicted because he was sort of part of this conspiracy.
He was this inciter, right?
This cult leader, so they say.
And you see this thing with Keith that I think is interesting is that, you know, he was charged with a number of things.
But one of the main things was he was accused of basically brainwashing these women in order to perform sexual acts and get other women through collateral and brainwashing to perform acts as well, right?
That was the accusation.
But then on the other hand, they go and they sentence Alison Mack for to three years.
And it's like, listen, if she was brainwashed, then she's not culpable.
And if she's culpable, then she wasn't brainwashed.
So it's like, you can't really convict both of them.
You know, you have to pick one.
I had that same thought.
I mean, how cruel is it to sentence someone to three years of prison when they were brainwashed, right?
If you really believe that that's what happened, why would you send somebody like that to prison?
You know, so it just goes to show how seriously they really regard the idea of brainwashing.
And it becomes a means for people to get out of trouble.
They just say that they were brainwashed.
It's a scapegoat tactic.
And yeah.
Yeah.
It's strange what's happened with that group.
I'm not really sure that I even believe that brainwashing exists.
Well, you have to be willing to be brainwashed at a certain point.
I mean, you're participating in it.
I don't, I mean, I know with hypnosis, I'm no expert on hypnosis, but the people who are able to be hypnotized and like quack like ducks or whatever, you know, that kind of showmanship style of hypnosis.
Carnival hypnosis.
Yeah.
Those people have to be really willing to be hypnotized.
They have to be into it.
You can't hypnotize somebody who does not want to be hypnotized.
I think that's like a general rule in hypnotism.
I could be wrong.
I'm sure I'll probably.
Have you ever been hypnotized before?
No.
I have friends, a good friend of mine who couldn't quit smoking.
He's been hypnotized many times.
And he's definitely somebody who allows himself to be.
Well, he quit for like two years, actually.
It worked.
He has to go for a refresher every now and then.
He's got to get a renewal.
Yeah.
Actually, it was probably a week or two after all this cancellation stuff with me started and life was just falling apart from under me on all sides.
And a friend of mine who's a hypnotist, professional hypnotist, called me and took me through a hypnosis thing to relax, you know?
And it worked.
It was basically like a guided meditation.
But if I didn't want to go there, I wouldn't have gone.
I guess there is a line.
You can draw a line with people who have diminished intellectual capacity or who have been like, you know, I don't know, horrifically taken advantage of in certain ways.
So they're psychologically in a state where they can be, you know, directed.
But that's different.
That's different than the hypnosis we're talking about.
So like I said earlier, I read that Colette piece that you did about going through the whole Me Too movement.
You basically got super fucked for a long time and have sort of come out of it, it seems anyway.
How did you cope with going through all that shit and overcoming the challenges associated with it?
Yeah, I think so much of it has to do with the way, because the way I was raised, very abusive households, I became adept at protecting myself by going within.
And that coupled with the training I've had in meditation over the last seven years or so, really saved me, really kept me from spiraling out of control.
There are any number of ways I could have spiraled out.
I could have freaked out on social media, just posting crazy shit, or could have started drinking or killed myself, which crossed my mind many times.
But there was something, call it grace, I don't know, but it swept in immediately when all of it started happening, and it kind of kept me grounded enough to not completely lose it.
Even though I was completely losing it, I was aware that I was completely losing it.
And the awareness of that awareness provided me with some stability and continuing to write poetry defiantly because I'm not going to let these people take that from me.
They can't, you know.
And yeah, it's been three years and it still flares up.
It flared up today.
Somebody wished death on me.
They said that I should overdose on pills and die.
And this is a poetry world person.
He used his real name in an account that he just created like yesterday just to fuck with me.
But that kind of discourse is acceptable in the poetry world and I think in the arts in general, if you're seen as, as he called me, a crypto Nazi.
He used the gore of a doll?
He probably doesn't.
This is how.
You call me a Nazi one more time, I'll sock you in your goddamn face and you'll stay plastered.
I love that clip.
I love that clip.
I've seen it many times.
One of my favorites, man.
They called you a crypto-Nazi.
They called me a crypto-Nazi.
Yeah, crypto-Nazi.
He thinks he's gore of a doll.
What a douche.
And I engaged him.
I was like, what?
So can you tell me in what way am I a Nazi?
I don't understand.
You're the one calling for my celibate.
So you can't say I was abusive.
Yeah, exactly.
And you're calling for my death because of an ideological difference that most of which you're just kind of fantasizing about because you don't really know what my politics of your conservative leaning.
Because it all stems from me tweeting that I'm more conservative than not these days.
When did that shift happen for you?
Was it just after the Me Too movement?
It started before then.
It started when I saw what was happening in the poetry world with identity politics and the absolute cowardice displayed by so many poets who wouldn't give any pushback to what was happening.
Specifically, and this is before even identity politics became a phrase that's used all the time.
This is like, I don't know, five years ago or something, six years ago.
And I'll make this very short, but a poet who's a conceptual poet, he doesn't really write poems.
He takes texts that already exist and then reframes them in a certain way.
Well, he did that with Michael Brown's autopsy.
Why he did that, I don't know.
I think that was certainly in poor taste, but this guy revels in poor taste.
He did this, he performed it, and then a group of poets calling themselves the Mongrel Coalition sprung up.
And they just started bullying poets and editors, demanding diversification.
And from what I could tell, most major poetry journals were already diverse in terms of having different...
If you want to get published, just write some fucking good poetry.
That's exactly.
And you got right to it with that comment because now it's become, it's not about the quality of the work.
It's about your, you know, your identity, your bona fides as a marginalized person.
And it's so bad that I've noticed, you know, white poets claiming a kind of marginalization that I suspect they don't really have.
Like, there are a lot of, I've noticed white straight poets always tend to have mysterious illnesses.
And, you know, they're sick all the time.
And so that's their thing, to let the poetry, that's their signal.
Lyme's disease.
Yeah, Lyme disease.
Yeah, that's a popular one.
No shit.
Yeah.
Because there's like no obvious symptoms, but you can just always say you don't feel good.
It's all these invisible illnesses.
I'm tired.
Oh, I'm so tired.
You know, it's like, that's their signal, you know, that they're not, I don't know, evil, evil white people.
So what's your writing process look like?
I mean, are you like scouring pages at 2 a.m. or is it spontaneous?
Is it planned?
How do you actually, what's your creative process?
I tend to write in notebooks and with pen and paper.
And after a period of time, whether it's a day or a couple days or a week, I go back to the notebook and mine it for things that are useful.
And then I work with it in Google Docs, just toying with the language, you know, revising it in all sorts of ways until it starts to sound, has a particular sound that feels finished, as finished as it could be.
And I like it to feel like it's outside of me at a certain point.
You know, there's no longer, there's no self-consciousness there anymore.
It's some other voice.
It's mine, but it's also beyond just this, you know, small self sitting here talking to you.
It's something bigger than that, which may sound very delusional and psychotic.
I kind of understand.
Would you say that creativity is something that the mind actually generates or something that the mind picks up?
Because I often think of the mind myself, and I don't want to say this in distort your response if you think differently, but I often think of the mind as more of an antenna than an actual vehicle that generates anything new.
I like that.
I like that description that one of my favorite poets, his name is Jack Spicer, and he had a whole theory about Martians and that his poems came from Martians, from the outside.
And I don't think he really believed that they came from Martians, but it was just an analogy, yeah, that the poems come from the outside and the poem or the poet is the caretaker of those messages and kind of like the curator of those messages.
Yeah, the poet is a receiver.
But it's what really separates poets from just people who rant on Greyhound buses and all that, who I believe probably are receiving messages from the outside.
I don't know if you've ever ridden Greyhound, but people...
Or ridden a Greyhound bus.
Ridden a greyhound bus, yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, I know what you mean.
So you receive.
It's really easy to take a nap.
So you receive these messages and then it's what you do with it.
You know, that's the craft part comes into it.
And, you know, do I really believe that the language itself is coming from the outside?
No.
But the impulse to even write a poem, it's coming from stimulation that's around me.
It's coming from the weather.
It's coming from my metabolism, too.
It's coming from all kinds of sources, you know, but including certainly the outside world, you know, yeah, for sure.
Who's your favorite poet?
I don't have a particular favorite.
It's like...
Who's one that comes to mind when you get asked that question?
That's a better way to frame it.
I would have to pick somebody like William Carlos Williams, who's like a foundational poet for me and my practice and for many other poets.
He was a modernist.
He was contemporary with Ezra Pound, friends with Ezra Pound.
I saw you too, Ezra today.
Yeah, yeah, I love that.
I almost tweeted Ezra Pound sucks just to troll you, but I didn't know that if you would get it.
I thought you thought he made enough to know I'm kidding.
No, I would get it.
Well, there's so much controversy around Ezra Pound.
And he's a classic example of the art and the artist.
And there is a separation.
Or if you're the other frame of mind, that there is no separation.
So all of his art is tainted by his crazy politics because he was a supporter of Mussolini.
That's why Mussolini seemed like a really good idea.
People forget that we have a whole different context for what fascism looks like now than the context they had in the 30s.
Yeah.
Well, that's well, that's, you know, people who would like to cancel Ezra Pound, let's say, they have no sense of historical context.
They're offended to even have that introduced to the conversation because they don't want their righteousness to be diluted by facts and by the truth.
And it is true that these things that Ezra Pound said in the 30s, we're in a historical context that we really aren't able to fully grasp.
We're not there.
So the woke people will look at these historical situations and look at people, look at these people from the past who may have said something abhorrent or whatever.
And they'll look at it through the lens of today.
It's like all time collapses into the now of social media buzz and hype and anger and hive mind reactivity.
And I think that's a terrible thing.
It's a terrible thing for art.
They were protesting Picasso recently because he was mean.
Something like that.
He was mean to his women.
So they protested.
The building still stands, even if the architect is an asshole.
That's right.
That's right.
I like that.
I will say, though, that I love the doors.
I always love the doors.
And I noticed you read No One Here Gets Out Alive.
That was one of the first books I ever read that kind of introduced me to your poetry too growing up.
It had that kind of orange-red cover.
That's right.
And I tore through that in junior high, and I watched the Doors movie, which I thought Oliver Stone did a great job with that.
I'm going to have to reset my camera again.
I can tell it froze.
But I tore through the doors movie.
And I will say that, you know, I think that Jim Morrison's poetry is good.
I think that his lyrics are even better than his standalone poetry.
I think the doors were great.
I did enjoy their music more because of who Jim Morrison was and his brand and what he stood for.
So like, you know, I think that you should separate the art from the artist.
And I think you should, you know, consider them independently.
But you can't say that they're completely isolated either because the way you experience what someone creates has something to do with their identity.
Yeah, no, it's never completely separate.
And to really appreciate an artist's work, well, I'll put it another way, your appreciation can be richer and deeper of any artist if you know a bit about their biography, the context of where the work came from.
It enriches the work in that sense.
But to condemn a work, I mean, there could be a movement.
We could start one actually to cancel Jim Morrison posthumously because you saw it in the Oliver Stone film.
I mean, he picked up a duck that his girlfriend had roasted so nicely, threw it on the ground and stomped on it.
Locked her in the closet and set the house on fire.
Yeah.
Let's not forget that one.
I mean, it was bad, but it was a duck.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's about understanding that art's made by human beings.
But art is also hopefully transcendent enough to be better than the artist.
Not in some corny, you know, feel-good like chicken soup for the soul sense, but just at least when I, the poetry that I read, I know that that work is inspired and the poetry I like.
The work is inspired and does transcend the human being who's writing it.
You know, it's an expression of the best of what a human is capable of when working with these materials that they're given, whether it's language or paint or whatever.
And for the reader, it's a way to participate in that, not an ideal state, but a state that can be aspired to in a sense, you know.
And it vivifies the world, you know, like great art.
Great.
And I hate using generalizations, but I read a beautiful Wallace Stevens poem.
I see the world a bit, things are brighter.
Things are clear.
I'm feeling more.
My heart's open.
My mind's open.
But he also was a dick.
I often think of art as a...
You should publish that rant.
This is the first page.
Send me the transcript.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So I often think of art as a coping mechanism, especially music.
I guess all art, but music is the one that comes to mind because it's so accessible.
Both a coping mechanism for the consumer as well as the artist.
And it seems to me, and this could be off-base, so I'm totally interested in your thoughts.
It seems to me that in order to have the discipline and the motivation to make incredibly good art, which is often not lucrative, even if you're amazing, in order to have that sort of discipline and motivation, it seems to me reasonable that you have a greater demand to cope with something or you have something bigger that you need to cope with.
So it would inherently follow that there's an increased likelihood for really good art to be made by really fucked up people.
It bears true in the biographies of poets who are truly great, who've stuck around for whose work continues to be read, like Wallace Stevens.
Yeah, he said some very cruel things to people.
By all accounts, he was just kind of a weirdo, you know, he was like, he would be considered creepy these days.
Like he probably would end up on some list as creepy.
You know, he would have been me too, certainly.
But yeah, it's, and I think for so many artists, too, I mean, this might take us down a whole that I'm not equipped to go to go down, but I think it starts for so many artists, the artists I love and that I've studied, it starts in childhood.
And there's a wound there.
And the creative act is not only a way to reclaim agency, but in a way to kind of put the world and all of its chaos into some kind of order, or at least into, you know, a kind of song, a kind of way of making sense of it, you know.
And then that matures into wanting to make sense of the human condition in general or just wanting to address the human condition.
And, you know, and by doing that, you bring others with you into that greater understanding of what it means to be human.
Like you mentioned Kerouac earlier.
His demons were right on the surface, you know, and he wrote.
He was so fucking awesome.
It's like Silicon Valley just caught up with him.
They're like microdosing.
Well, I just think kind of, because he was really into the Eastern stuff before it was trendy.
That's true.
Yeah.
And I just, I feel like sometimes I laugh at Silicon Valley when they like, they start doing these things in the name of enhanced productivity.
And you heard a lot more about it before Trump was elected and everybody just talked about Trump exclusively.
But, you know, they were micro-dosing LSD for increased productivity and comparing the performance on Medafanil versus Adderall and trying meditation in order to calm their mind so they could be more productive on doing a software binge.
And there was like this sort of like idol worship of maximum productivity of intelligence in the Silicon Valley software tech startup thing.
And I think that it was just funny to me how these people who I don't typically consider to be spiritually enlightened were kind of commercializing everything that was good about something that really has nothing to do with commercial success.
It has to do with personal fulfillment and self-actualization rather than external.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, that is interesting because when Kerouac became involved, like the story of the Dharma bums and Jaffe Ryder is Gary Snyder, and they're discovering these Buddhist texts.
They're doing Zen meditation.
Philip Whalen is in that book as well under, I forget the name of his character, but he went on to be, yeah, he was the, what do they call the leader of a Zen ashram?
No, he wasn't a guru.
He was the leader of a.
He became a full-blown Zen monk priest, you know.
But they, they, they, they found these teachings right when they were introduced to to Western culture, or at least in the popular like American sense, because Alan Watts was contemporary with them, and his writings were influential to these guys.
And Haiku was just starting to become a thing, was being published in English.
R.H. Blice was all the rage, like an apple on the floor.
Is that in Dharma bums?
No, no, no.
He just made that up.
It was in Dharma Bums.
I just made that up, yeah.
You're a goddamn genius.
I'm a poet and I didn't even know it, bro.
Ever heard that before?
No, no, never.
No, never, never, never.
No, a drunk uncle has never slapped me on the back and said that in my ear.
Jesus Christ.
What the fuck?
Yeah.
Yeah, Kerouac, yeah.
Yeah, you're right.
They were in it for truly in it for enlightenment.
And I think Kerouac's interest in Buddhism was absolutely sincere.
Oh, yeah.
He might a devout Catholic, I believe.
I think he went back to the old Catholic roots.
Well, he was always Catholic, and that's an interesting thing about his spirituality.
I guess it's not incompatible.
Yeah, he wrote about them in tandem.
You know, he never fully became, you know, I'm a Buddhist.
That's never, he never, I don't, he never said I'm, I don't, he may have, but he was always a Buddhist and a Catholic, and I think more of a Catholic than a Buddhist.
But, you know, if you read Golden Scripture of Eternity, I think is the title of one of his Buddhist-inspired texts.
He was kind of not imitating, but kind of writing in the style of Buddhist sutras and stuff like that.
It's totally sincere, you know, and I think my impression is some people view his interest in Buddhism as a kind of corny cultural appropriation thing, you know, and certainly was not.
There's no fucking such thing as cultural appropriation.
That is such bullshit because all culture is a combination of who you know, right?
That's right.
Yeah, yeah.
You call it cultural appropriation because we have a taco stand in a white neighborhood.
Well, those fuckers are speaking Spanish because Spain invaded them.
Okay.
So they culturally appropriated Spain.
All right.
So it's bullshit.
It's who you know.
And if you're hanging out with people that know different shit, you're going to appropriate their ideas.
It's just going to fucking happen.
Who gives a fuck?
Oh, my God.
It's such a kill switch.
It's like, if you say cultural appropriation is morally out of line, then how are we ever supposed to make progress anywhere?
Because it seems to me that all progress is, culturally speaking, is changing and sharing ideas.
Totally.
Culture is appropriation.
Culture wouldn't be culture if other cultures weren't being appropriated and blended.
And that's culture.
Is there such a thing as a pure culture that is undefiled by influence?
No, there's not.
The Goddamn Romans culturally appropriated Greek architecture.
Exactly.
Yeah.
Fucked it up by making the Corinthian column.
Yeah, let's cancel them.
Cancel Rome, bro.
Cancel Rome.
Yeah.
I mean, they were terrible.
They're, you know, feeding people with blinds.
Rome's still around, man.
It's Rome.
In the air.
They just turned the state into a religion.
Are you Roman Catholic?
Yeah.
If I may ask.
I converted in college because I thought I was going to be a politician.
And I thought it would be necessary for me to be Catholic.
My actual faith is I call myself a Jordan Peterson Christian and that I consider myself Christian, but nobody who's Christian would think I was.
I think that can be said for a lot of Catholics.
I mean, a lot of like the real mystic Catholics, they're way there.
Well, Catholicism is already too far out for most Christians anyway, you know, but the mystics, and I'm thinking even of like Thomas Merton, there's a poet named Robert Lacks who I don't know if he'd identify as Catholic, but he may have been Catholic, but he was a good friend of Thomas Merton's.
And I don't know.
They were just, they were, they were very radical, aesthetically speaking.
I mean, Robert Lacks was.
His poems would consist of just repeated words as a kind of mantra, you know.
But I don't know.
I guess it kind of ties back into Kerouac because Thomas Merton and Robert Lacks and others have seen the relationship between Christianity or between the teachings of Christ and something like Buddhism or the great wisdom teachings of the East.
And I love that.
I love that approach.
I was baptized Catholic and thought about becoming Catholic.
I was going to the, whatever they call those classes for adults.
The confirmation.
Oh, yeah, the RCA.
The RCA, something like that.
Yeah.
And I got totally, I couldn't get through the purgatory thing.
I knew that they I knew Catholics believed in purgatory, but I did not know about indulgences.
And I did not know that basically, if you're not on the level of a saint, you're going to purgatory.
It doesn't matter if you just confessed and you're going to purgatory.
I mean, and that freaked me out.
And I, it, it, it, yeah, it put me off, but that doesn't mean I don't.
I think I think Catholicism is beautiful.
So the problem that I have with Catholicism and other denominations of Christianity is I think that Christians lean too much on the veracity of the magic, right?
So when I was going through RCIA, one of the guys is like, you know, one of my problems as I struggle with this decision is I'm not really sure that I believe that Jesus Christ literally came back from the dead, you know, and everyone's like, oh, no, there's, here are the reasons why we believe that, you know, at the end of the class, I pulled him aside.
I was like, listen, I was like, it doesn't matter if it really happened.
That's not the thing.
You know, and what I mean to say is, if you look at like Old Testament stories in particular, and there's that famous story where they're moving the Ark of the Covenant, which you were not allowed to touch, right?
And they had to move it on this like platform, just like Indiana Jones.
And one of the guys slipped and the guy behind them put his hand on the ark so it wouldn't fall off the platform that they were carrying.
And as soon as he touched it, was hit with a bolt of lightning, right?
And if you believe that literally happened, you walk away thinking, do whatever the fuck God says or you're fucked.
But if you think it's a metaphor, then maybe the meaning is don't do the wrong thing for the right reasons.
Maybe it's a deeper meaning.
Maybe it's an anti-Machiavellian story that the end doesn't justify the means, right?
And maybe you'd be a better person if you could adhere to the metaphor of the story, the actual meaning, the theme of the story, than adhering to it as if it actually happened literally.
And I think a lot of things in the Bible, I think, actually happened, okay?
So don't get me wrong.
I don't think the whole thing's just made up, but I think an awful lot of it is intentionally allegorical because it forces you to discuss it with your peers, to think about it, to ponder it, and come to conclusions about what it means to be a good human being that you wouldn't come to those conclusions if it was historically just a, you know, a text.
Yeah.
I mean, and those, the books of the Bible, I mean, they're coming from an oral tradition, I think, right?
And it's a way, I mean, just reading the Gospels, Jesus taught through allegory, you know, and parables and such.
And yeah, the Bible is full of those.
Like the whale thing, which I was thinking about recently because somebody in Massachusetts doesn't say whale.
Some fisherman in Massachusetts got swallowed by a whale for real recently.
You know what's crazy about that is if you're spending long enough, if you spend long enough time, I swear to God, if you spend long enough time in the belly of a whale, the digestive fluids will bleach your skin.
Oh, yeah.
In the story, Jonah and the whale, he's described as glistening or whatever when he's beached.
That's proof.
So it's like, you know, yeah, I don't know if it's proof or not, but it's just, it's just funny that, you know, like you read it and it comes off like a miracle.
Like he was blessed and he came out of this whale, like resurrected.
And it's like, or maybe he was just fucking bleached.
That's interesting.
Well, the guy who got swallowed by the whale recently, he was so intent on not going down to the belly because he knew what would happen.
He didn't want to hold on.
He didn't want to be digested.
Yeah, he was holding on.
I mean, it's wild.
I saw a clip of that.
I didn't think it was real.
Why did I bring that up?
Yeah, I brought it up as an example of maybe something in the Bible that didn't actually happen, but was used as a teaching tool.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I think that's a lack of a better word.
It's an enlightened way to approach Christianity and especially Catholicism.
I find a lot of value in Catholicism and in the saints and in a life of devotion and in the ethics that are conveyed and established within Catholicism, despite all of the nightmarish things that have happened.
Why do you think that is?
Nobody talks about that.
Really?
I mean, so many priests, like over 30% or something.
It's like astronomical numbers.
Well, I guess there's no way to tell if priests were engaging in that kind of abuse, you know, before recorded history or before anything like that would be thought of.
Anybody would think to record it.
Right.
So I'm just imagining that many years ago, century ago, a priest was probably, he was the center of the village or whatever.
There was a much more community-based thing.
And that's even true going back before Catholicism started to take a downturn because the town I grew up in was mostly Catholic and it was a very community-based thing.
I just think that there's way too much stimulation in the modern world for people to live a celibate life.
And when they're trying to live a celibate life and they're surrounded by what they're surrounded by, I think it causes major distortions in the mind, you know, and someone's wired.
Apparently, the priests have denied themselves any sexual gratification for so long that it started to mess with their psyche and they expressed that psychological stress in unhealthy ways on other people, the most vulnerable.
I think that has something to do with it, but also that there are priests who became priests to prey on kids.
There was like a case here locally recently, the priest, this guy was abusing kids from the very beginning as soon as he put the cloth on.
And, you know, yeah.
But it's nothing I just said, do I absolutely believe?
Because I don't know.
And I wonder, too, why is it so pervasive in the Catholic Church?
I don't think it's as easy as just saying the modern world is overly stimulating and to the point where trying to live this devout and celibate life will warp someone.
But it seems maybe plausible to me in some situations.
I don't know.
I don't know.
Well, if you think about the if you think about the widespread cultural use and acceptance of pederasty in the Roman civilization, and you think about the union of Rome with the Catholic Church through Constantine and those cultural influences, you know, after the fall of Rome as a state, it's still, the culture still existed in the church.
And, you know, they were speaking Latin at Mass until the 70s, right?
Or the Vatican II was.
And maybe it's just the case that it's a hangover from a culture 1500 years ago and those traditions kind of stuck around in a sort of secret kind of we don't talk about away and we just kind of discovered it.
Yeah, no, it's like, yeah, I think you nailed it.
It's the secretiveness of it.
And I mean, these cases of priests that have like, you know, done horrible things to many children, they were moved around from parish to parish to parish.
Right.
And the records were kept sealed.
So it's a culture of protecting each other and keeping it totally secret.
Maybe if that were dealt with earlier on, you know, like it wouldn't have blown up to the point where it has now.
Because I think there still is a culture of secrecy within the Catholic Church.
The guy who I was talking about, he killed, he actually killed a boy, this priest.
And he confessed only a few weeks ago on his deathbed.
He finally confessed.
People thought that he did it, but he finally confessed.
What were the circumstances of that?
It was someone he was abusing, and no one, he didn't go into detail about why he did it, and he was using very cagey language, but enough to let the police know that he did it.
But he took him down to the river and bludgeoned him with a rock and threw him in the river.
And the Springfield Diocese.
But he was a hell of a poet, man.
Hell of a poet.
I'm sure.
They still won't release the documents they have on this guy.
It's like, why not?
Why?
Why are you hiding these things?
So they still keep things very close in that way.
And I think it's wrong.
It's disgusting.
Well, what's the solution?
Just let priests get married for a generation, though, work itself out.
Well, I think after the first credible accusation of child abuse, they should be defrocked.
I don't know what that word means.
I'm sorry.
Well, that might not even be the word they use.
What is the word they use when they make a priest, they laicize them or something like that?
They strip them of their priestly.
Basically, fire priests.
That's why they're not doing it.
Yeah.
Well, God gives a hell of a homily.
Of a homily.
Give him a pass.
It's very sad to me because I love the beauty of the Catholic Church.
The beauty, literally, the aesthetic beauty and how they treat aesthetics is.
Yeah.
You won't go into a more beautiful church.
You have almost a spiritual experience just walking into it.
And the way it smells because of the incense and the holy water and the fact that it's open all the time and empty most of the time.
It is definitely an inspiring experience to walk into a Catholic cathedral.
Yeah, always.
And they always have a particular silence and a particular vibration about them that I find very calming, very comforting.
Yeah, and the Catholic Church here where I live is very old and very beautiful.
It's just recently renovated, brought back to its original glow, its original splendor.
They clean the stained glass windows, and it's just, yeah, it's stunning.
And I love that.
And I love Mass.
Mass is a beautiful ritual.
You know, it's funny because the Catholic Church believes in transubstantiation, right?
So they believe that the communion actually literally turns into the body and blood of Christ in your body through a miracle.
And the Catholic church that I went to when I lived in California offered a gluten-free version of the host.
That is amazing.
That is amazing.
Are you making that up?
That's real.
I couldn't come up with that.
I mean, I'm creative and clever, but that's pretty good shit.
I haven't heard that one.
That's California, man.
Yeah.
I know.
I know.
Well, so what's next for you?
What are you working on now?
I'm writing a memoir.
So the Colette essay spurred on this idea to write a full-length book about those experiences and other experiences.
But it's really an extrapolation of, I mean, it's almost like the Coulet essay is like an outline for the memoir I'm working on.
And so I'm in the middle of that process.
I'm maybe halfway through a decent draft at this point.
Do you know what it's going to be called?
No, I have so many bad titles.
You know, that's just the way titles go for me.
I come up with dozens of really, really, really bad ones.
I mean, if I told my brother one of the titles and he just started laughing hysterically and he continues to mock me.
Do you mind sharing it?
I will.
I will.
I'll do that.
I'll be vulnerable here.
I have to say, I was so loaded on iced coffee when I came up with this.
And I don't know what I was.
I mean, I was kind of, yeah, and it was really hot.
I probably had heat stroke, but it was, you can't cancel the sun.
And my brother just thinks that's hilarious.
And I agree.
It's a fucking terrible title.
You know, it's like, I'm trying to come up with a metaphor for like, yeah, it's just, it's not, it's not working.
But they have to be that bad in the beginning for me to finally stumble on the right one.
You should call it Joseph in the Technicolor Rainbow.
That would work, actually.
It would work.
Well, so what's it like when you sit down?
And I don't want to take too much of your time, man.
I know that we've already gone over for you.
Oh, it's okay.
I'm just enjoying this conversation so much.
What's it been like writing a memoir?
Are you like having memories that you forgot that you even had?
Oh, man.
So when I first started writing the memoir, I didn't know about what was going to happen because as I was writing about my childhood, I found myself becoming very irritable, depressed.
I was sitting at a picnic table in town here in a park, just like writing a notebook, and some drunk guy was screaming the word faggot and stuff.
And I just stood up and walked right over to him and told him, shut the fuck up.
And I normally wouldn't do that.
I would just avoid confrontation, just, you know, whatever.
He's drunk.
But I realized that I was still in that.
I was in the frame of mind or in the space of childhood again.
And I was hearing this man screaming and screaming faggot, which I was, you know, I grew up in a working class area.
You write poetry or show sensitivity.
You're a faggot.
I've been called that many times.
Yeah.
I got brothers in the middle from middle class America.
I've been called a faggot more.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
Because, you know, you can play the piano.
Yeah, so really it upset me, and I went over to him, but it's like, why did I do that?
It didn't really click until later in the day or the next day that when I'm writing about any period of time in the past, something happens psychologically where I'm put back there.
Even when I'm done writing, a part of me is still there.
And the memoirist Mary Carr wrote a book called The Art of Memoir.
And she talks a lot about that.
And when I read that, I was like, oh, God, now I really understand what's happening.
And she basically says, if you're writing a memoir, if you can't handle that, kind of the emotional wear and tear of working on such a thing.
Like she said, after she turned in a memoir, she got the pneumonia.
One guy, another memoirist who's popular, he relapsed.
Lyme disease.
That only happens when you're writing bad poetry.
But yeah, so that part's been as much work as the writing itself, the mitigating the side effects.
But at the same time, it's been a wonderful way to process so much stuff, so many things that have happened.
You already lived through it once.
You can do it again.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah.
And it's, yeah, and it's led to forgiving, you know, many of the people who were terrible to me as a kid and forgiving the people who were behind ruining my life, you know, for scurrilous reasons.
I mean, just completely vague bullshit reasons.
You know, I admit I've fucked up in the past.
I was a weird, bad drunk.
But a predator, a serial abuser, groomer of women, groomer.
They use the word groom.
Who did I ever groom?
They've never, you know, it was a year-long campaign.
They never had any receipts.
There was never anything really specific aside from one or two incidents.
And they just, you know, they magnified those to the point where that's who I am.
That's who I am to them, to these people.
I'm not even human.
I'm like Harvey Weinstein or something.
And it's awful.
It's absurd.
Is it hard to, because I know forgiving is part of the healing process.
Is it hard to forgive someone who's dead?
Like, I know, for example, your uncle was a bad dude and he died.
Do you wish that he was still around so you could have had some closure?
No, no, I've never had that thought because I don't know how he would have, I don't know how he would have continued to live in the way that he was living.
People might be watching or listening that don't know anything about the essay I wrote, but he was, I think, closeted homosexual and he did very, he abused me.
I don't know, he may have abused other people too.
Yeah, but he was very closeted and lived in a very homophobic environment.
He lived with my grandmother, who was all, you know, it was, yeah, faggot.
You know, that word was just being thrown around the house all the time.
So I don't know how he would have survived his life anyway.
So I don't really, I tend to not think about it because it's so bleak to me.
But the forgiveness is, it's never about letting someone off the hook.
It's never about, you know, justifying his behavior in any kind of way.
It's just no longer hanging on to the anger that keeps me attached in this way that is ultimately damaging to me, you know, to him.
Like just, you got to cut the cord, you know, and let him go.
It's more about releasing the anger, no longer holding that anger towards that person because you're only damaging yourself, whether that person's alive or dead.
And forgiveness, too, doesn't have to be done.
You don't have to tell somebody you're forgiving them.
You don't have to, some people you do.
But in the case of my uncle or my grandmother or these people who I don't even know who are attacking me and trying to really actively destroy my life, I'm not going to email any of them and tell them I forgive you.
But I'll be damned if I walk around with resentment and anger that literally would cause me health problems.
Like I'm not giving that to them.
Like I'm, you know, you're a really fucked up person.
You know, you must have, not you, Chase.
I understand.
You know, you got to be really, you got to be really messed up to, say the least, to go after somebody in the way that they did and the tactics they were using, the things they were saying.
It was terrible.
They threw the kitchen sink at me.
And they're in pain.
Yeah.
One of them, a couple of them I see in town because two of them live here in the town I live in.
see him every now and then walking around and yeah they just look very lost very broken very
sad i'm not walking around like that you know so do they just like avoid eye contact they totally avoid eye contact they totally avoid it but the the one this guy who was a male feminist at the time during me too he put it in his bio he's like a poetry world guy he really came after me with everything and i i don't know why i barely know the guy never did anything to him but he walked by me about two years later and uh tried to just walk right past me and
i said hey so and so and uh you had a lot to say about me online why don't you say it to my face and he immediately got irate as a defense person on the defense would like what are you talking about he said what are you talking about yeah he said what do you talk he said what are you talking about and i was like you know what i'm talking about because you spent a year harassing me emailing my publishers he said it to his if he said it to your face if he was like all right what would you how would you have reacted
um i
i would have i would have countered it with with um well i did end up count because he event after he simmered down at you know in the beginning he started throwing things at me he said you're thuggish you're uh this he called me thuggish like and i said i just i just stopped him i said what what do you mean thuggish can you give me an example of my of my thuggery like how have i behaved thuggish he was like caught in the headlights and it just it was like seeing it in person like
how it's all about the charged language that they throw at you there's doesn't have to be substance around it you know but it's different when you confront somebody face to face and they realize they have no substance and so he said let's go on a walk and we went for a walk two hour walk he admitted things to me that i told him i wouldn't repeat and i'm not but i i'll say though that it was an orchestrated thing that went on he
apologized and i i forgave him i told him i forgive you i said and if you ever have any problems if you need to talk to somebody let me know because he reeked of alcohol and i know he had just got a divorce and um that really that was closure so when i see him walking around here
i don't have any reactivity towards him you know that's awesome that you had the opportunity to do that you know it's really seldom i think everybody in their life has two or three people that really hurt them and it's very very uncommon to have the opportunity to work that out it was a gift it was a gift as difficult as it was because i mean at certain points it was you know i i had to really
mindfully keep the rage down you know like really had to kind of just not go there because i'm walking next to somebody who i mean hundreds hundreds of tweets emails to my publishers to the person i was worked at school i was doing work for um yeah it was uh brutal i mean he would mock me relentlessly you know he would it was um really bad yeah that's it that's it
but I, you know, we're okay now.
Enough.
We're okay enough.
And I guess that's another kind of forgiveness.
And other people, I'll never see them.
I'll never run into them.
Some of them I don't even know what they look like.
But I can still forgive them in the sense that I'm not going to carry around bitterness and resentments because that would also fuck up my writing because I can't write if I'm full of bitterness and anger that hasn't been processed, you know?
Sometimes anger can give you momentum when you're writing, but that kind of anger, that kind of resentment, there's a kind of entropy to it, and it's not conducive to creative activities.
Fascinating.
Well, thank you so much for coming on, man.
It's been awesome.
Thanks.
Thanks.
I could talk to you forever.
I'm glad we did.
Well, we should just talk anyway again.
Yeah, absolutely.
Let's stay in touch.
Where can people find you if they want to follow you and read your books?
You can find me at, I'll tell you the address.
Yeah, JosephMassey, my name.substack.com.
I have a newsletter.
I send out a poem a week.
And yeah, that's the best way to connect.
Okay.
Awesome, man.
Well, thank you so much for coming on.
I really appreciate you.
And good night and good luck.
All right.
Good night.
I solemnly ask of every man who hears this case to let his own mind pronounce a verdict upon it.
You have heard the testimony of the state's witnesses.
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