A Forsley Feuilleton: Franz Kafka Should Have Spent His Time Shooting Dice With Confidence On The Corner Instead Of Writing Letters In confidence on the paper – Act One

This month I’ve only written one Forsley Feuilleton – I’m writing the second right now.  I blame my lack of productivity on my lack of brain activity, and I blame my lack of brain activity on my lack of nourishing meals, and I blame my lack of nourishing meals on my lack of income, and I blame my lack of income on my lack of writing talent, and I blame my lack of writing talent on my lack of brain activity, and I blame my lack of brain activity on my. . . you get the picture.  And if you don’t like the picture you get, ship a bag of apples, a box of sardines, and jar of multi-vitamins my way so next week’s Forsley Feuilleton will more closely resemble a picture of a naked Scarlett Johansson than the leopard pattern spandex and a rusted tinfoil sailor hat wearing street schizophrenic that this week’s Feuilleton resembles.

The picture you get from this week’s Feuilleton – the one I’m writing right now – doesn’t have the solidness and smoothness of a naked Johansson. . . it has the randomness and ruggedness of that street schizophrenic who, just yesterday in San Francisco, grabbed my little tattooed arms and said: “Franz Kafka should have spent his time shooting dice with confidence on the corner instead of writing letters in confidence on the paper.”

There’s nothing I can do about it.  I’m coasting on ramen noodles and frozen burritos as I write, and you’ll just have to put up with the fragmented, delusional picture that my unnourished, inactive brain creates for you.  It’s a picture painted with paranoia, an us against them mentality, that will, as any good conversation with any good street schizophrenic does, reveal itself in an anti-Government – or whatever you want to call the all-powerful entity that controls and perverts every facet of our lives – sentiment.

Don’t blame me.  It’s not my fault my brain is unnourished.  It’s not my fault I’m not a talented enough writer to make a decent enough income to buy green enough vegetables.  How do you expect a contemporary writer like me – a writer not in cahoots with the Big Publishers and the idea controlling leaders of the New World Order they front for – to afford brain nourishing meals? Maybe a contemporary writer like me – a writer not activity helping the Illuminati control the minds of that almost non-existent sub-culture of Americans who practice the ancient art of reading words – isn’t supposed to afford brain nourishing meals.  Maybe, just maybe, such a writer – according to the plans of the Powers That Be. . . the Shadow People. . . the fucking Puppet Masters – is supposed to have an unnourished brain, one that is inactive, passive, and harmless.

They – and by ‘they’ I mean THEY – make sure our brains stay in such a pitifully harmless state by eliminating, or at least rendering obsolete, the bookstores and literary magazines we were once able to infiltrate with our subversive ideas and sometimes even earn enough income from to buy a brain nourishing meal.  Now our only hope is in electronic literature publishing magazines – magazines like PANK – that continue to fight the good fight against Big Brother. . . you know, that fucker who not only got you grounded for smoking a cigarette while waiting for the school bus and stole all the Starbursts from your Halloween bag, but also got every copy of your first book burned by every copy of George Bush they created and dispersed across this land of, as Bill Hicks described it, “you’re free to do as we tell you.” Kafka called this land Amerika.

What little hope there is for the last of the literati in Amerika is vanishing.  Online literary journals like PANK are small.  They’re run by insane volunteers that are afflicted with the need to put words to paper. . . or, if they must, to glowing screens.  Big Brother, on the flipside, is big – big like Dirk Diggler’s dick which, under the direction of Jack Horner and Paul Thomas Anderson, changed porn forever.  Like the literary world, the porn world now exists almost exclusively on the internet. . . and who wants to read on the internet when, just a few clicks away, there’s a video of three beautiful women making raunchy love to Sasquatch under a waterfall?  The answer – based on the 40,229 Facebook ‘fans’ Girls Gone Wild has compared to the 94 ‘fans’ A Forsley Feuilleton has – is this: not many.

And, to make matters worse, those 94 Forsley Feuilleton Facebook ‘fans’ are made up of family and friends that feel bad for me, partially naked ‘girl next door’ personas who want me to watch them get totally naked on their web-cams, priests and cops with fetishes for longhaired redheads, and porn fanatics that think a Feuilleton is a French adult film sub-genre.  None of these ‘fans’ have any intention of reading my column, not this one or the next one.

The next one, Act Two of “Franz Kafka should have spent his time shooting dice with confidence on the corner instead of writing letters in confidence on the paper,” will be about gambling and why, just as the leopard pattern spandex and rusted tinfoil sailor hat wearing street schizophrenic said of Kafka, every writer would be better off gambling than writing.