Tomorrow

Back in my early twenties, I spent a lot of time going from coffeehouses to coney islands drinking too much coffee and writing. Much of what I wrote was destroyed in an act of artistic purging that I think of as a forgetting. What remained was a handful of stories, essays, and journal entries on some CDRs. This book is the collection of those writings.

I didn’t have much respect for formal writing back then. My mindset was that I was an artist and I wanted to write abstractly and fuck you if you didn’t like it. Some of what follows is gross, confusing, baroque,abstruse, and offensive. I wanted it to be that way. What I figured was that if I started out writing the weirdest stuff in the weirdest way I could muster, then even if my talent developed into something more scholastically and intellectually respectable…it would never be too standard because I had started out doing something odd.

The tough part is that back when I was writing this stuff, people didn’t appreciate it or get it. Looking back, I can’t blame them but it did fuel me in both good and bad ways. What I did was unusual so it scared off anyone that wanted to read normal shit but it wasn’t weird enough to really impress the weirdest of people. So, I found myself writing crazier and crazier. Back when I was writing this, I didn’t really have a clue how to write. I had a natural inclination to do so and an arrogantly rebellious attitude when it came to learning non-autodidactically.

Some of these writings are at least a decade old. They all fit together, tho. As I was collecting the stories for this book, I nixed a few findings because they weren’t old enough. This collection is a glimpse into who I was. It’s both indicative and not indicative of my other books and future books. The only way I can think to explain it is like how a band can get together and make a bunch of songs before they really develop a sound all their own. Some bands release a cd of those misguided, shot-in-the-dark kinda songs. This book is like those recordings.