I apologize for no longer being 19, almost as hard and with slightly more whimsy, than the apology I gave last June for no longer being 29. The hornets were out bad that June night.

Yes, life is impossible, and it will kill you, too, if you let it or if you want it to, too, and if you fight it and rage against it too.

Facially plausible claims suffice. That is a modern standard, like shorts on the shortish side, showing man thigh, which seems wrong to me and discomfiting. It seems wrong to me and discomfiting, too, how much we have succumbed to mass hysteria and to a seeming need, however debased and debasing, to equate art as a sub of life and life as a cuck of nature. I may not be modern, but modernist.

I find the glamor of Emily blunt’s sister tantalizing, and if that is shallow, I want to be rewarded and valorized for being shallow, after being given some tagliatelle that her husband made for me. I want that for me, and if that is selfish, then let Godfrey Reggio and his recovering Jesuit pothead virtuosity be the light against which my selfishness is backlit.

A post-script, culled from a manifesto that betokens being beholden to, e.g., NUDE IN YOUR HOT TUB, FACING THE ABYSS

I. Down from the Mountain

Once upon a time, writers were like gods, and lived in the mountains. They were either destitute hermits or aristocratic lunatics, and they wrote only to communicate with the already dead or the unborn, or for no one at all. They had never heard of the marketplace, they were arcane and antisocial. Though they might have lamented their lives — which were marked by solitude and sadness — they lived and breathed in the sacred realm of Literature. They wrote Drama and Poetry and Philosophy and Tragedy, and each form was more devastating than the last. Their books, when they wrote them, reached their audience posthumously and by the most tortuous of routes. Their thoughts and stories were terrible to look upon, like the bones of animals that had ceased to exist.

Later, there came another wave of writers, who lived in the forests below the mountains, and while they still dreamt of the heights, they needed to live closer to the towns at the edge of the forest, into which they ventured every now and again to do a turn in the public square. They gathered crowds and excited minds and caused scandals and partook in politics and engaged in duels and instigated revolutions. At times, they left for prolonged trips back to the mountains, and when they returned, the people trembled at their new pronouncements. The writers had become heroes, gilded, bold and pompous. And some of the loiterers around the public square started to think: I quite like that! I have half a notion to try that myself.