What does it take to get some attention around here? In most households (and advertisements) pugs are always the cynosure of all eyes. Not here. When you have a hundred pound Deerhound, an aged beguiling Scottie, and the Bruce Lee of cats, pugs are not getting the respect they’re owed. (Not even from Autocorrect, which has twice insisted I meant to write pigs.)

My China Girl. Eloise.

Beautiful Her

One trunk and twelve surviving limbs.

Now I’ve got thirteen books out there, and most of you think it’s vanity. Time for me to tell you and everyone: it’s all one work. There is the trunk, and then there are the limbs, including the sawed off ones.

It’s the most ambitious unified writing project of the last hundred years. And I have mostly completed it before my death.

What is the trunk? Surprise. Not The Boomer Bible but Punk City. There was an idea called punk writing, a rebellion against nihilism and authors hiding behind their solecisms. I made up a writing movement that required dueling in the open.

Punk City was their story. The Boomer Bible was their scripture. And every single one of the books in my repertoire is an offshoot of that scripture, from the most analytical to the most personal. Because all share the same objective and the same source. A mission to expose and ridicule the fatuities of the twentieth and now the twenty first centuries. Writers hide behind their narratives. They have an obligation to tell who they are and what they believe. Why this monumentally massive work.

Thirteen books. 3000 pages more or less. Every kind of focus and compass point. Humor, satire, science, music, art, literature, history, technology, physics, analysis, spoof, and personal revelation, the past, the future, the nature of life. But all originating in a few fictional square blocks in Punk City c. 1980. One work. Thirteen books from a single inspiration.

Now he’s just an old man, most limbs sheared.

I am the Salem Oak. 2017.

We are all from some place. Where are you from?

Funny how we keep hearing about the deaths of actors, 91, 92, sometimes 95. Must be old wise men. You know who all has died recently. Love to see their blank old eyes. They never were anybody. Must be a great empty way to live, pretending to be the ones who were somebody. When your own time comes, you still have your cheekbones.

Or maybe not. Poets die very young. In the twentieth century, the most talented writers teeeend to die quite young, are the ones who don’t live on and on like Michener and Herman Wouk to become tendentious bores.

Not to mention all the dirty minded Philip Roths of the world.  Takes a professional Manhattan masturbator to think a literary reject can be saved by contemplating the flushing of a shiksa toilet on the upper east side. Literature? No. Trash lives forever.

i asked my wife to do the math. Mostly, great poets die in their twenties. Great fiction writers die iin their forties and fifties. She’s got the who’s who and the when’s whens. Ask her. I can barely get off the couch.