Journal Entry, Midwest American Wilderness, 20 February 2013 C.E. 00:03 —
Keep flashing on the superb David Cronenberg movie NAKED LUNCH, with the eerie & ethereal Peter Weller. Great Ornett Coleman soundtrack, too. The movie combines the titular book with episodes from Junky, also a Wm. S. Burroughs novel, also based on real life events rendered surreal by drugs and the cut-and-past narrative.
It’s becoming evident to me Burroughs wrote such intense, destitute material because his own drug use took everything from him. He lived in squalor most of his life. His work made him famous, not rich. As an old man he lived in a concrete bunker in NYC, essentially an empty cement block storage area between the walls of an empty industrial building.
He watched everyone go away from him and experienced existential isolation from a brainy, informed perspective. Remember, he was formed by a prominent family, Burroughs Business Machines. He’d been educated well and had traveled, following the cheap hashish and heroin on what is now called the Hippie Trail. Back then it was the Beats.
I flash on these things because I’m feeling his shrieking silence, his arid lushness of abandonment. Not being a user of bug powder, I’m left, as so often, with nothing but words. These are some of them. Others will go into fiction. All will be cast into the void of inattention writers wander so incessantly.
It is a cold night and dark storms are expected to dump perhaps ten inches of snow on us. It was shirtsleeve weather only yesterday, or was it the day before?
Time to feign sleep and dodge nightmare. Time to court normalcy with a new husk pillow. Time is the devourer, the marker of our brief respite from the eternity of suffering that is nonexistence; it is all and nothing in a single slap.
At least I’ve had my oats.
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