The Faux Pas Press #47
13 July 2010
By Jason Fresh
What You Do
Fuck Hemingway, who did little with the greatest war in history. And fuck people who act as if they are gonzo like Hunter S. Thompson. You will probably imitate the great genius, Parley Angerbliss, probably imitate like Plato foretold. If the essays of our time are written against the joyous life, if the only questions to which Americans are accustomed spike into the private workings of my paycheck, or the Johnson’s paycheck, or the Trumps, and if every artist concerns himself with not having one, then I will hold a square place, I will get away with becoming the artist, independent of drinking a 12 pack of Sierra Nevada while discussing political and economic upheaval, independent of reading the words of kids who think it was cool to get evicted. I’m a coward I guess, the one honest Coward. Mark Twain must not have been too sorry about his paycheck, what he did for a living. He probably felt poorly about all the money he invested so poorly.
“What do you do?” a charming female asks me. I’m trying to be moral, trying to be a man watching UFC 113 or 144 or some shit. She has rubbed my back a couple of times, not like my daughter rubs my arm, unknowing and innocent, but charmingly, intently, imagining that I’m a man with a job. I say, “What you do is figure out what you are. What I do is whatever I choose.” If you spend your entire life trying to figure out if the person you are talking to is cool enough - fuck you too. You have the right to live and the right to die however you want. I will be born old again, and again – just as I was born before and then killed by those who were not. That is what you do.
That is what you do. I’m not too good for the machine and neither are you.
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