elle

About me:

If you're going to try, go all the way. Otherwise don't even start. This could mean losing girlfriends, wives, relatives, jobs. And maybe your mind. It could mean not eating for three or four days. It could mean freezing on a park bench. It could mean jail. It could mean derision. It could mean mockery, isolation. Isolation is the gift. All the others are a test of your endurance. Of how much you really want to do it. And you'll do it, despite rejection in the worst odds. And it will be better than anything else you can imagine. If you're going to try, go all the way. There is no other feeling like that. You will be alone with the gods. And the nights will flame with fire. You will ride life straight to perfect laughter. It's the only good fight there is. --Henry Chinaski/Charles Bukowski

I have had a complex and somewhat strange life thus far, of which this document truly reveals very little. I have experienced both monastic security and actual life-danger, creative joy and the fervor of active political extremism, hippieish promiscuity and chaste discipline, clandestine anonymity and fame, underground and underworld, imprisonment and freedom, the street life and aristocratic milieux. I suppose I am an extremist ... yet every day and every page reminds me that the opposite poles may be closer than they seem, and I can't help but delight in those moments of synthesis. I am grateful for all that has happened, and, though somewhat more settled now, it's not over yet. And through it all, I've been writing every day. --Zoe Tamerlis Lund, 1962-1999.

I'm no longer a child and I still want to be, to live with the pirates. Because I want to live forever in wonder. The difference between me as child and me as adult is this and only this: when I was a child I longed to travel into, to live in wonder. Now, I know, as much as I can know anything, that to travel into wonder is to be wonder. So it matters little to me whether I travel by plane, by rowboat, or by book. Or, by dream. I do not see, for there is no I to see. This is what the pirates know. There is only seeing and, in order to go to see, one must be a pirate. --Pussy, King of the Pirates by Kathy Acker

At my best, I am open-minded, kind, silly, intelligent and fun-loving. At my worst, I am self-centered, impatient, mercurial and loud. I try to be more of my best than my worst but I consider myself a work in progress.