He has swallowed enough suffering to never be naively whole again. His entire tragic empire could fit into a cheap drifter suitcase. He is a creature in harmony with the brutal way of the world, and also the recent recipient of a very bad jailhouse haircut.
At the bedside ledge is a paperback library where God and salvation and the ghosts of literary kingpins loiter. Faulkner, Melville, Updike, Kafka, Twain and Hunter S. Thompson. Desperadoes all. Together we mock the absurdity of the human race.
And I’ll carry the firm sentiment in my holster that mankind is conceived in ignorance and born into squalor and grief and then it all goes downhill from there.
I’m secretly terrified of waking up one day, frozen stiff in the saddle–a hunch-backed, keg-bellied, bullet-eyed 59-year old jerk with a wicked/sad comb-over who has just spent the last 20 years bingeing on Pringles and pull tabs and second-rate pleasures, wondering how things could have slipped away like this.
For reasons beyond the grasp of my comprehension, I chose a world of drugs and violence and mayhem. I thought outlawry was a glamorous trade; I thought cocaine was a sexy game. A lost soul to say the least.