Letter to Katrina

Anyway, I'm watching a movie called "The Last Time I Committed Suicide", which is this movie about Neal Cassady, probably the most influential person of the entire beat movement, and it gave me the urge to write, to purge my soul of the mad rush of the energy that suddenly overtook my veins, man, so I've got it playing in the background, this information reaching my head via some sort of emotional connection I have with this whole scene, these words flowing not from me, but from something else, something a little more primal but not quite as fucked up as if it were really from me.

But what's this that I see, what's this that I really want to know, or just as much, what I really want to say? And I put a poster of Beck up on my closet door today... he doesn't have the beat, but still, baby, he knows where it's at. And the one thing that I can say that I know for sure right now, is that I... I don't think that I really want what I want, and I don't really think that I need what I need, and it's the white picket fence dream that I think I want to ignore.

I've never really felt so much energy, so much focus on a specific task, but at the same time not really being able to make much sense as to what the task actually is, as to what I want to commit to this earth as the final words from my mind, from my gut... What do I want to spew forth from these my unfortunate lips, or as the case may be, these my unfortunate fingertips.

So I don't want to let this letter go, even though I know that on it's own it's going nowhere, and with my help it'll get there even later, be slowed down as it were, and will start to make even less sense. But I can feel the manic urge, that mad rush in all my senses telling me to write on, about nothing, something, about anything that'll make it alright, this letter, this life, this fucked up crazy world that's the best thing we got whether we like it or not, whether we realize it or not.

And the unfortunate thing is that Neal Cassady missed his shot at the good life, and it wasn't really through any fault of his own. Circumstances ruined his chances of being a real live full-fledged human member of society, and I don't want that very same thing to happen to me, or to happen to you, so I crack open a bottle of home-made wine and think, my God, this is one really long sentence, and alcohol won't solve anything, but I keep on drinking anyway, because there's nothing else, nothing left to do, not really.

And I want to take up smoking, sometimes. Not because I think it's cool, and not because I think that it won't hurt me, but because it would give me something to do with my hands aside from type out endless strings of mad, meaningless sentences that really do have meaning, in all ways except the standard sense of the word.

And I want to pound out the rythm of these words, beat the beat of them on my drums, but here I'm not really free to do what I want, not really free to say "God Damn That Feels Good!" at the top of my lungs, like some long-lost faraway lover once taught me to do.

And did you know that I save all of our correspondence, all the real thoughts and ideas exchanged between you and I... and I wonder if you do the same, but I realize that it's not really important, as long as one of us does it.

And I can hear the jazz, from the movie, from the television, from the black and white nightmare that I'm trapped in but at the same time moving around, and it makes me feel good and free and clean, but I know that it's not true, that I am none of those things, that I am simply a victim of my own desire caught in a trap of my own devising, the steel kind, with jaws that don't let go.

And then the music stopped. I think the next line in the song is "she took her shoes off", but what relevance would that have here, what purpose would that serve? No one is going to dance with me. Not here and now, possibly not ever.

I asked an old lover why she stopped being mine, the other day, and do you know what the answer she gave me was? She said, "I asked all of your friends, your closest buddies about you, and none of them could tell me anything. None of them knew you. And I thought, if your closest friends didn't really know you, how could I ever know you?"

And that makes sense to me, in a weird sort of way. How can someone love me, if they don't know me? How can I love them? That's really weird, that sort of feeling.

Anyway, the movie is off, and the music has stopped, and even though I still have all this mad, pent up energy, I've run out of steam, because too many people and too many things are competing for my attention.