Grilling a Mean Steak, or The Case for Carnivores - by Danny Boy

Now I don't mean to interrupt the telling of classic myth and lore, but all the chatter about antelope and mammoth summoned my appetite. Which is why I'm about to detail a skill many seek to attain and is actually possessed by far too few. Moreover, it is a crucial ability for any well-rounded Barbarian aspirant. And furthermore, this recipe provides you with a good reason to stroll down to your nearest butcher and pick out the most appetizing upside-down-hanging, raw hunk of meat.

the Marinade
1/2 cup of lemon juice
1/2 cup of brown sugar
4 tablespoons of dijon mustard
4 tablespoons of soy sauce
4 tablespoons of olive oil
1/2 teaspoon of pepper

Mix all that together and add garlic to your liking. It may sound like a 19th Century concoction to cure polio, or a green way to lubricate your car engine, but it's actually quite - to steal a word from a friend - robustful. Take my word for it.

the Steak
Marinate the steak for up to a day. The longer it sits, the stronger the flavor. Douse the coals with lighter fluid or crank up the gas, and grill the steak on a medium flame for 8-12 minutes a side, depending on the cut and how you like it cooked. The marinade is enough for a 1 1/2 pound piece of meat, so go nuts. After 20 minutes or so on the grill, hoist a mug of suds and enjoy.

The First Barbarian: Part V - Glory, by Danny Boy

For even if it lies dormant, like a slumbering giant or quiet volcano, the soul cannot deny the spirit that resides within it and the uncanny power in its awakening. Like the chocolate encased in an M&M candy-shell, the sweet Essential must one day be tasted, even if it melts in the hot and humid habitat of your mouth, not your hand. And Barba son of Ryan led his weary faithful back to the great ivory gate. As they approached, Dipsi the Maniac asked of his leader;

"What do you intend to do here, Barba?" The group came to a stop as Barba son of Ryan whirled around to face them. It was very dramatic.

"I have come to realize something, dear Quartet," Barba began. "You see all this time, I have been searching for something. I did not know what it was, but I knew that I must find it. It has taken me long enough, but what I have realized, my friends, is that you must always follow your heart. And if what we want is wine, women, and snacks, then we must make wine, women, and snacks for ourselves. If you cannot be true to yourself, you cannot be. That is the Barbarian way." And then he pounded on the door and led them into the city of Lazation.

"Gentlemen," Barba spoke, his voice booming like a cannonball, "I intend to party my leopardskin off."

Whereupon Barba son of Ryan and the Quartet went on the biggest booze run ever, way bigger than Prom, Spring Fling and an average dinner at Hank Moody's combined. They loaded up on awesome and unheard-of snacks like dunk-a-roos, cheddar goldfish, and shark bites (and presciently threw away all the purple ones, since nobody likes grape-flavored candy). They brought out their drums and built a leaping fire and chanted their tunes under the winking stars, and the bright full moon smiled on them as He crossed the sky, ordaining their festivities with his solemn, celestial shine.

And although Barba and the apostles were unsure who, if anyone, would attend - in fact, they would have been just as happy with a sausage fest; sometimes guys need a guys' night - their glee went uncontained when droves of humming people showed up in their gladdest rags. It had been a rather long while since the citizens of Lazation had been given the chance to throw down, and Barba's party had all the makings of a great one - it was illegal.

Soon the party was rumbling. It resembled that party in Zion from The Matrix: Reloaded, except not totally weird and lame. The women swooned and gyrated sensually while the men quaffed great chalices of mead and showed off their virility by making their pecs dance alternately, a feat that never failed to charm the human ladies. Together these ancients gave a whole new meaning to the term "clubbing."

Late that night Barba son of Ryan stumbled outside, his belly full of meat and drink, his libido momentarily curbed but still far from satisfied, his knucklehair matted into sweaty, twisted thickets. He craned his bulbous head to the heavens and let out a terrific and triumphant howl that would shame Tarzan, Ginsberg, or even DNC Chariman Howard Dean. A salty drop of bittersweet happiness pooled in the corner of his eye as Barba thought of Ryan, Barba, and Kemba - those who had helped him on his way, made sure that he stayed true. He lost consciousness in a bed full of women, with some blue-nosed mandrills in there for good measure, confident that he had just thrown the greatest party Lazation had ever seen.

When he woke in the gray dawn, it was neither the pounding ache between his eyes nor the desert that had settled unwelcome on his tongue that stirred him. It was the incessant toe tapping of that damned Vice Roy, standing over him, hands at his hips, a-tisk-tisking.

The First Barbarian: Part IV - Wanderings, by Yonza the Barbarian

Barba son of Ryan led his quartet out of the city into the desert. They wandered with the sun on their backs and with civilization a forgotten word. They were forever free, and for this they were grateful. But they were not totally satisfied. After all, what is freedom without food, wine and women? And plus it was really hot. Probably over 90 degrees everyday, although to be fair it got pretty cool at night, but sometimes a little too cool and then they were chilly.

The quartet spoke to each other behind their leaders back during their times of wandering. Riban son of Willhims inquired: “Was Barba son of Ryan afraid to challenge the Vice Roy? Has he not the Barbarian pride?” The men were getting tired and hot. Sand storms swept the land violently, and they got sand in their pants which itched. Barba son of Ryan sensed a mutinous sentiment growing in the men. He knew something had to be done.

During a sleepless night in the desert after many months of wandering, Barba son of Ryan walked away from his camp and yelled into the sky: “Mother, the former she-goddess, the God Barba, hear my pleas. The quartet is tired. They need wine and women and food. Help us. Drain wine from the earth! Rain bread from the skies! Bring women from the air! Mother, my blood, fulfill this request and I will be grateful.” Barba son of Ryan yelled loud enough that the quartet could hear him, and they all snickered because he was asking his mom for help. Unfortunately, Barba son of Ryan’s humiliation was for naught, because the god Barba was on the planet Pluto hunting for Space-Mammoths, and sound waves can’t travel through a vacuum i.e. outer space.

The men wandered for another decade. Their feet became callous as well as their hearts. The quartet had planned a mutiny and it was about to come to its crisis when who should they see wandering in the desert but a lion -- it was Kemba! The men could tell because of a big scar on Kemba’s cheek that he got from falling off a waterfall and scraping his face on a big rock in the middle of the River of Nispair the Titan. Kemba walked up to the men and let out a treacherous roar. Then he spoke in the voice of Ryan son of Kavil: “Son, it is I, your father. When I perished in that camel accident in your infancy I was given demi-god status by your mother Barba. Your mother and I have been watching you from our house on Mercury and we have been proud of you. But these past years, you have led your men astray. Where hast gone thy booze? Where hast gone thy chow? Where hast gone thy honeys? And I see you’re still hairy so that’s good. But you only have one of the four qualities of the Barbarian: that is not enough.

“As you know demi-god’s can inhabit the body of mortals, so I have returned to earth in this form, of your friend Kemba the lion. And I am here to tell you to challenge the Vice Roy; to return to the city of your birth; the city of my birth. It was there that the three days of darkness fell upon the earth, and in the three days I felt, for the first time, the twinkle of Barbarism in my heart and my loins. And it was in that third day of darkness that you were conceived in a murky lagoon in the western plateaus, and from my seed sprung the New spirit, the spirit of the barbarian, and it is in you.”

The demi-god soul-smoke of Ryan son of Kavil left through the mouth of Kemba. Kemba, of course, died since once you are inhabited by a demi-god your organ systems stop functioning completely. Barba son of Ryan announced that they would return to his city of birth, the city of Lazation, and that they would practice the four virtues of the Barbarian whether everyone else liked it or not. And if everyone else didn’t like it, well, then they would challenge the Vice Roy to a vicious fist fight.

The First Barbarian: Part III - The Return, by Danny Boy

And so it came to pass that Barba son of Ryan and his apostles landed on the rocky shore of the land that had once been his home. "You will love it here," Barba assured his followers, "or I'll be a mandrill's lover." Neither wanton Wilt nor ruffled Riban, craving Kobi or dizzy Dipsi were privy to all the intimate details of their leader's lewd and indiscriminating love life, and so they did not take his guarantee with as much levity as perhaps they should have.

Banded together they traipsed through the wilderness toward the towering stone entrance of Barba's birth city. Animals picked up on a foreign yet familiar funk, and flocked in awe to watch the hairy, malodorous group rumble across the jungle floor. All but the sabertooth tiger kept their distance, well aware of the legendary appetite the exiled son possessed. Word had it that at his most hungry, not even a XXL Hungry-Man Meatloaf dinner could satiate him. Nor could working his jaws on hippopotamus blubber.

"Ah, Kemba!" Barba son of Ryan shouted, recognizing an old friend skulking in the brush, and running towards the mangy lion wrapped his heavy arm around its royal mane. He introduced the apostles to Kemba one by one, an introduction Kemba acknolwedged by yawning lazily and pawing the zebra carcass that lay beside him.

Barba son of Ryan and his entourage finally arrived at the city gate, the wild cats of the jungle slinking suavely in their wake. The exiled son raised his hand and shouted "Gunga, Gunga Galunga!" with all the air in his lungs and rapped his knuckles three times against the heavy door. "Let me enter!" he bellowed. Never before had they seen such pomp or security, and the apostles stared eagerly at each other; Kobi's mouth watered for a Hebrew National.

Slowly the tall door creaked open, and as Barba strolled in, his crew in toe, he was met with many a dropped jaw and widened eye. Imagine the surprise jolting these simple citizens, to have banished such a man, such a creature, only to have it return seven years later, and with four more creatures just like it! Men covered the eyes of their partners, fearing (rightfully) that such a sight would change them forever. Women that managed to sneak a peek shrieked deliriously, and young children - unaware of the identities of the visitors or the significance of their coming - belched and expelled flatulence, having nothing better to do.

Just then the old Vice Roy appeared. "What are you doing here, Barba son of Ryan? You've been exiled." Everybody paused in their tracks.

"It's time that I returned," Barba replied, winking slyly. "I told you I would."

"And I told you to stop joking around!" the Vice Roy spat. "And you promised that you'd never come back." The apostles began to move restlessly.

"I had my fingers crossed behind my back when I said that!" Barba whooped defiantly. "So Nyuh." The Vice Roy grimaced at the ground, disgusted. "So do you guys have any ketchup? Me and my buddies are famished and I was thinking I'd go out and bring us a nice, woolly, mammo-"

But Barba son of Ryan was interrupted by the Vice Roy, who clapped his hands together in the midst of his speech. Immediately a line of guards formed. They wore the furs of mammoth and bear, and aimed their spears at Barba and his apostles.

Then Barba sounded his mighty whistle (you know, the one where you put two fingers in your mouth - that one. Barba had been practicing for a long time), and the apostles assembled behind him in their attack position, forming the dreaded Barba Chop-Quartet. For a long moment they stood ready, waiting tense for the signal from their leader to unleash themselves. But the signal never came. Barba's fist, wound into a ball at his side, raised slowly towards the sky and the wind kindled behind his growl.

"So be it," Barba son of Ryan began. "We want no part of your foolishness. Remain within your walls. We will do as we want." And he grabbed Wilt son of Chamberlain by the arm - as he had begun sweet-talking a sweet maiden - and led his boys outside, into the free world.

The First Barbarian: Part II – Exile by Yonza the Barbarian

News of Barba son of Ryan’s birth swept from cave to cave like wildfire. He was a site to be seen: as hairy as a wooly mammoth, and as hungry as six wooly mammoths. By the time he was four he could eat an entire antelope in an hour. By the time he was six, he ate elephants in a single meal. And when he was hungry, he got what he wanted. Some would say, “Barba son of Ryan, you eat so much! You mustn’t have any more!” But Barba son of Ryan rejoined: “Hungry. Why wait?” He drank wine in excess and lusted after all women. When he wasn’t making love to women, he was making love to the blue-nosed mandrills that swung form the tree outside his cave.

He was different from the rest of his kind. The humans said he was of Neanderthal upbringing, and the Neanderthals said he was of human upbringing. They chastised Barba son of Ryan: of eating away the great surplus, of drinking away the libations, of carrying lice and worms in his chest hair and spreading disease that way, of having sex with mandrills. And when they accused him Barba spoke in a mighty whisper, so powerful it blew the clouds out of the sky: “Harm me not, for I am not cruel, I am that I am.” But nobody understood what he meant, and the cruel misunderstanding of society spread like locusts during the spring of 100,026 BC. Society banished Barba son of Ryan, telling him never to return to Africa.

Barba son of Ryan had no choice but to obey. In the name of propriety, the Vice Roy of Africa promised Barba son of Ryan that upon his departure he would be granted four requests. Barba son of Ryan said: “I need no time to think. I have my four requests. 20 loaves of bread, one for each year I lived in my mother, the God Barba. Four satchels of wine, one for each of my so-called flaws: hairiness, desire for drink, lust, gluttony. Twenty-six concubines from the Northwest delta – one for each year I have lived. Finally I would like seven hair-braids with which to braid the hair on my body – one for each year I spend away before my return.”

His four requests were granted, but the Vice Roy gave a stern warning, he said that Barba son of Ryan better have been facetious about “returning” because he was supposed to be banished for good, not just seven years. Barba son of Ryan nodded his head, but he winked and so the Vice Roy gave a second warning: he told Barba son of Ryan to stop joking around, and that he saw him wink. Barba son of Ryan then stopped playing games, and just left.

For seven years the great civilization of Africa kept as usual. The men ate the right amount and kept their partners for life. They drank wine in moderation, and were by-and-large hairless. Meanwhile Barba son of Ryan had traveled north across the Mediterranean sea and scoured the earth. During his travels he met four men, each of whom had a virtue which he saw in himself. Riban son of Willhims from the Mediterranean archipelago was known for his extraordinary mane of back hair, which flowed elegantly down in spiraling braids. There was Kobi son of Yashi, who haled from the Far East. Some say he could eat over 60 hot dogs in twelve minutes. There was Wilt son of Chamberlain, who was born in Africa but had traveled north in a log-boat. He had loved over 20,000 women. Finally, there was Dipsi the Maniac, whose love for wine had driven him mad. The five men became known throughout the Mediterranean and were named after the leader: they were called the Barbarians.

Together the Barbarians formed two parts: their leader, Barba son of Ryan, and his four apostles, also known as the quartet. The Barbarians lived in a drunken, orgiastic, hairy eating binge for many years. Then one day Barba son of Ryan announced that he had made a facetious promise seven years back that he had to keep. And so the men all squeezed onto Wilt son of Chamberlain’s log-boat (it was really long, so they all could fit pretty easily) and they floated back to Africa.

The First Barbarian: Part I by Yonza the Barbarian

Before there were barbarians, the world lived in peace. Men and Neanderthals, wooly mammoths and saber tooth tigers, they all loved each other, and they all loved every other member of the animal kingdom. It was a time of unfettered civilization, where civility was a virtue beyond all others, and where propriety was not merely the norm but the Only. Gluttony and lust were unheard of: you ate your proper amount and you loved your partner for life. You sipped your wine, but not to excess. You expressed your disagreement, but you didn’t bear your anger.

In this time, the time of civilization, peace reigned over the land, and everyone had according to need. The year: 100,000 BC. The place: Africa. Some scholars say it was a happy time. Other scholars say it was a time of contentment, but not necessarily a time of overwhelming glee. Others say it was a stifling time, when art suffered in the name of domestication.

The crucial moment, the moment that changed the course of history, was a hot day in 99,999 B.C.: July 4th…Independence Day. A fierce wind came from the east, and swept the antelope across the plains. A darkness fell on all of Africa, for three days and three nights. And the people waited, sat hushed in the cool, damp cave dwellings. They cuddled with their saber tooth tigers, and groomed their wooly mammoths. The Neanderthals, the heliolaters, danced their ritual dances. But no matter how hard they danced, no matter how many times they popped-and-locked, the sun stayed occluded.

Meteorologists of today have studied this event, but few have any explanations of why darkness swept the land, and most of the explanations are far-fetched or obsolete. One leading theory is that a black hole temporarily sucked up the sun, but then because of Hawking radiation the sun was radiated back out in three days. Many physicists contend that this explanation does not make sense, since a black hole would suck up the earth too. Other physicists argue back that maybe the earth was sucked up in a black hole, and that is actually why it was dark. Other physicists say that couldn’t be, because then everyone would be dead. To this, experimental physicists at NASA have said that maybe the hawking radiation brought everyone back to life. Then philosophers argue that hawking radiation couldn’t transmit souls, and so even if it did bring people back to life, they wouldn’t have souls, and if you don’t have a soul then you’re not a real person but an automata.

But perhaps there is no scientific explanation for the three days of darkness. Certainly, for the people of Africa, it was an event that transcended any earthly explanations. So for one day everyone waited, and even though the people were scared, civilization was maintained. During the second day of darkness, the Neanderthals, who had spent over 24 hours dancing, and popping-and-locking, fell asleep. And even though mankind was scared, and the Neanderthals were sleeping, everyone kept their civility.

Twelve hours into day three a funny thing happened. A barrel-chested troglodyte rustled himself up off his wooly mammoth bed and peeked out of his cave. He was curious and began wandering outside in the darkness in the Africa plains. It was like nothing he had ever seen before. Darkness all around and not a soul in sight. You see, society was so civilized that everyone followed a strict curfew and went to bed before the sun set. Standing in the plains, staring out into the star-speckled blackness of the universe, the man, whose birth name was Ryan son of Kavil, felt something he had never felt before. In all the annals and tomes that document this momentous event in the history of human kind, I have never seen a paragraph that could accurately describe what Ryan son of Kavil felt. The simplest way to describe it was a mixture of angst and overwhelming freedom. Ryan son of Kavil ran unfettered through the deep African grass, and splashed through the murky lagoons of the Western plateaus. It was in one of these lagoons that he saw, silhouetted in the darkness, the she-goddess Barba. That night, together in the murky lagoon, they boned to the squawking stridence of vulture-raptors.

After a twenty year incubation period, when the three nights of darkness only remained a distant memory of the elders, Barba went into labor. For seven days and six nights, Barba was in labor. Ryan son of Kavil, who by then was an old man, sat by Barba for all seven days. And on the seventh day, a baby boy emerged from Barba the She-goddesses snatch. Barba had died in labor, and transcended from her human form into a full God and floated up to space, like a hot air balloon in the springtime. Ryan son of Kavil shed seven tears, one for each day Barba was in labor. And in honor of Barba, Ryan son of Kavil named his one and only child: Barba son of Ryan.

The New Genius and The Old Problems by Yonza the Barbarian

No wonder they cannot appreciate the really central Kafka joke: that the horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from that horrific struggle. That our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home. It’s hard to put into words, up at the blackboard, believe me. You can tell them that maybe it’s good they don’t “get” Kafka. You can ask them to imagine his stories as all about a kind of door. To envision us approaching and pounding on this door, increasingly hard, pounding and pounding, not just wanting admission but needing it; we don’t know what it is but we can feel it, this total desperation to enter, pounding and ramming and kicking. That, finally, the door opens…and it opens outward – we’ve been inside what we wanted all along. Das ist komisch.

- DFW, Some Remarks on Kafka's Funniness

I chose this epigraph not so much for its profundity, but for the fact that it was the shortest DFW quote that I could responsibly crop from the page without doing his thought stream injustice (and I wouldn’t dare to it injustice because then I would be forced to rectify it with footnotes (and maybe even footnotes to those footnotes).). But at least I get a chance to honor the great David Foster Wallace, who, in my meager reading of him, I’ve come to appreciate as a genius. But his genius isn’t the type of genius we normally attribute to writers or artists or musicians. It is a new genius, a genius, which while not identical, is much more closely related to that of great mathematicians or economists or physicists or philosophers. It was Socrates, as attributed to him in Plato’s Apology, who said that the poets don’t even know what their writing means. And he’s got something there: the process of writing, as is true with the major disciplines subsumed under the heading of ‘arts,’ comes more from inspiration than from deduction or calculation, and so the rudimentary machinations of art-creation are hidden under the tarp of the unconscious. It is the same as the graceful contortions of an athlete’s body during a high-pressure play: if you were to ask him how or even what exactly he did, he would not be able to give you a very detailed or satisfactory answer. So many minute movements and unconscious calculations go on in an athletes mind there is no way all of it is within the breadth of awareness. And the same with the geniuses of art: the timeless complexity of great works is too much for an artist to be aware of.

But DFW is a new type of genius. He is a genius not by inspiration, but by overwhelming awareness; awareness of the world, awareness facts, awareness of knowledge, but most important of all, awareness of his own self, his own cognitive mechanisms and buried motivations. He was a car with the hood ripped right off, and he could see inside: the battery, the motor, the pistons, the poppet valves, all revealed to inspect as well as anyone could inspect the road ahead of them. And with the engine revealed, DFW had access to stuff that most of us don’t or only get access to with exhausting introspection. This is why DFW uses so many footnotes; a footnote is a whisper of our unconscious, a tangential thread that is just barely thick enough to register, but which we feel moderately obliged to include in an argument. But DFW did not see threads; he saw webs! He saw each diverging thought and counterargument and where it led to and the responses to all that and so on and so forth. And they didn’t whisper from his unconscious, they spoke with a firm voice. DFW could not ignore them. When we see a red light flash in that glassed off control area above our dashboard as if there might be a problem, we might often ignore it, thinking it is no big deal But if we could see the light AND see that the engine was smoking, then we couldn’t ignore it. DFW always saw the engine, and it was always smoking.

The New Genius of DFW does not make him superhuman, of course. The footnotes, while revealing a certain cognitive perspicuity, can be a burden to read: linearity is good unless the very tangent the footnote tackles happens to be especially revealing to the reader, for example, if the reader notices a hole in DFW’s argument, then looking for a footnote will usually do a fine job of patching it up. For me, the footnotes are not necessary reading. They are optional. And when read that way it makes some of DFW’s writings less of a struggle to read, or at least, it isolates the struggles to looking up words in the dictionary.

Now I must admit, DFW’s suicide last Friday came as a surprise to me. I don’t know why, but I thought of him as a haughty but happy-go-lucky person. So let me do a little DFWing and try to figure out why I thought of him that way: he’s a writer (low pressure), teacher (directly contributes to others well being), he has money (McArthur genius award: $500,000), gets to investigate lots of interesting things (see Big Red Son), good weather (Claremont, California). Seems pretty good. But most of all, what made me envision his temperament this way, was the fact that his writing lacked the despair-factor that makes it so unsurprising when a writer commits suicide or resorts to alcoholism. Write a book about being impotent in the face of true love, and when you off yourself f I’ll say, “sad, but it figures.” But DFW rarely came off as despairing; he came off as a smart-alecky jokester that was against taking anything too seriously. In fact, one of the few things he did seem to take seriously was the lack of seriousness in writing today (see DFW’s essay Joseph Frank’s Dostoevsky starting at the quotation from The Idiot). For me, it seemed (and perhaps still seems) like the key to a totally fulfilling and contentful life: being creative and not taking things too seriously. If you have those two abilities in life, I thought/think, you’re golden. But against my conjecture came the cold, impregnable wall of empiricism: he hanged himself. He wasn’t happy. And hanging, by the way, also seemed to me like a very un-DFWish way to off yourself. I feel like he would be the first to criticize how trite and melodramatic hanging is. There are plenty of bridges and tall buildings: if you really hate the world that much why put in the effort to make a neuse? And where did he hang from, anyway? I’m thinking now, and I can’t think of anyplace around my house that would make a nice hangman gallows? Maybe he had a deck?

But when this guy, this New Genius, who I thought was happy-go-lucky, killed himself it made me think about something – all these geniuses, artists, these greats, these idols with whose virtues and ideals and lifestyles so many people try or wish to emulate, whose paths we praise as noble and whose experience we describe as great or fulfilling – that all these people are not happier than we are. How many suicides and alcoholics and drug addicts do we have to see before we realize the mundane life, quality-wise, is not much different from the aggrandized, “noble” life of the artist? We all want to believe that their path is the greatest for some reason, that starving for a passion is somehow more respectable than the dreary alternatives.

Here is the fight song for that ideal -- the poem Roll the Dice by Bukowski:

if you’re going to try,

go all the way.
otherwise,

don’t even start.
if you’re going to try,

go all the way.

this could mean losing girlfriends,

wives, relatives, jobs

andmaybe your mind.

go all the way.

it could mean not eating for 3 or 4 days.

it could mean freezing on apark bench.

it could mean jail,

it could mean

derision,mockery,isolation.

isolation is the gift,

all the others are a test of yourendurance,

of how much you really want to

do it.
and you’ll do it

despite rejection and the worst odds

and it will be better than

anything elseyou 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.

do it, do it, do it.do it.
all the way

all the way.

you will ride life straight toperfect laughter,

its the only good fightthere is.

The last line gets me every time: “It’s the only good fight there is.” I want to cheer for it. I want to say ‘yes’ and go out and live the miserly life of an unrecognized poet, and suffer, and “be alone with the gods.” And more than this, is that second order desire: the desire to believe that it is the only good fight. But I don’t believe that, no matter how much I desire to. Or, let me rephrase. It’s not that I don’t believe it, but the way in which I believe it is not straightforward, and it changes from day-to-day and hour-to-hour. Sometimes I become disheartened, and the sense in which I believe it is not-at-all. Take this: the epithet on Bukowski’s gravestone: “Don’t Try.” Of all the ways to throw my mind into a confusion! And on a gravestone, no less: how can you argue with that? So which one is it, Bukowski? And why so serious, DFW? Where do I want to go? Which side of the door am I on?