Insert Laugh Track Here

The Author is considering seriously for the first time in several years the prospect of writing another esoteric, convoluted, likely unreadable book. And while we here at Poets & Suicides enjoy (or perhaps even require) the constancy of The Author’s determination to destroy himself, we have noticed a slight movement in The Author’s words toward some imaginary reader, as if The Author were considering, for the very first time, what a book or story or essay or poem might have to look like in order for people to willingly consume it.

This reconsideration (or to maintain accuracy, first consideration) of the needs of what The Author has always ironically referred to as “his readers” (when in fact, the editors of this unnecessary publication are certain that NO ONE has ever read one of The Author’s texts) has sent The Author into a downward spiral of self-doubt that we did not think possible, as we’d assumed The Author was already at the bottom of whatever hole his 54 years of downward spiraling had generated. The questions raised within The Author’s mind are multiple: Should The Author manufacture this next imagined next text according to his whims and subconscious impulses, producing a book that might be maximally pleasing to The Author but minimally pleasing to those coexisting with The Author on this planet of humans? Or should The Author take a step (or two, or ten-thousand) toward “the reader,” whose wishes are difficult but presumably not impossible to predict and who, The Author has been led to believe, has the power of the entire capitalist consumer structure coursing through his/her/its/their veins and genitals?

Anyone who has sought to manufacture language-art products knows that consciously suppressing one’s own impulses and writing in a way that is not endemic to the authorial mind-space tends to render an author detached from her own work, disenfranchised by their own words, at an unreal distance from the very text-product meant to bring that author closer to the experience of The Real. At the same time, The Author is aware that he is a nihilistic lunatic whose impulses lead him to manufacture texts that, at best, only fellow nihilistic lunatics can appreciate; at least The Author assumes such kindred-spirited appreciators exist, because he has yet to receive tangible proof—in the form, perhaps, of a tear-stained love letter to The Author’s novel, ANTHROPICA—that his words have been assimilated by anyone at all on God’s dying earth.

In any event, the novel The Author hopes or even intends to write—which will feature dark energy, non-linear conceptions of time, dolphins and chimpanzees, vats filled with liquid consciousness, and an astronaut suffering from space-madness—has very little hope of finding a “larger audience” given that the text is already, before a single word has been put to paper, batshit insane. But The Author hopes you will begin to anticipate this novel, still years or even lifetimes away from coming to fruition, with an open heart and an open mind and a pocket full of crackers (or something like that). Meanwhile, rest assured that The Author’s preexisting texts remain available for you to Not Read. They, like The Author, are going nowhere.