x prose and some babbling

The voices never shut up.... they are there in the back of my mind howling and laughing and screaming every word I have ever heard, disparaging remarks, egotistical cheerleading... it is all there, the constant banter of a bilkllion books and the backs of cereal boxes and all the universe of things we read simply to have something to read. Sometimes it is fun, though.

This entry too has to do with my damned putting an ad in the reader begging. I am sure everyone I know will see it and feel like I have either lost my mind even worse than normal, gone on a drug binge, or rushed in where angels dare to tread. I mean, I don't play the lottery, or believe in pennies from heaven. All I ever won, in my whole life, came about when I was eight years old and won a bottle of ketchup. This was at a company picnic where the prizes started out as bikes and expensive toys then worked down to the left over condiments. We already had ketchup at home, by the way. THe pain I felt that day is probably worth all the years of telling this damn anecdote whenever I tell people that I believe that if there is luck, it is indifferent to me.

Okay, back to the novel notes....



X moves in with three artists and the kid they are helping to raise. The artists inherited a space from tehir uncle in a trendy neighborhood, where they have the corner space with a gallery, a game store, and an old bar. They live in one of the apartments up stairs and in the store, then rent the other two out to pay taxes and utilities and what not. They consider themselves part of a loose movement of writers who think they are batman influenced, meaning thattheir life is work of art too, in the sense that honesty and justice and what not have to be dealt out whether the cops want it to or not.

They start out defacing subway signs, move to putting weird poetic statements in the boxes in the subways which usuallly have maps, stage days where they stand out in public with signs reading, Will Vote Republican For Food. They are long haired, kind of post punk guys. All are different. Paulie, the guy who inhereted the place, is a half mexican kid paints scenes from video games and is the most successful of them (which is not saying much). Jimmy and Johnathon are the other two artists. Jimmy is a sculpture and a painter. He makes elaborate, wall sized peices out of foam that resemble landscapes and then paints them like aerial views. (in fact, I have been meaning to try my hand at some aerial views, and it would look cool three dimensionally, especially if you made it round and coming out from the wall, like a planet or something....

Johnathon is easily the sanest of the four. He represents a kind of melding of the intellectual with the animalistic.... but he is also a romantic with a death wish. In fact, it has to be mentioned that he has tried to kill himself a few times in his youth.

Matt is youth, the one who has to decide which way to go with his life, which bits of culture to pick up and what to discard.


POSSIBLE PROSE FOR X


The cops showed him the pictures of his pit bull; throat torn off in the front, both ears... he closed his eyes and nodded, yes. He remembers that day too much, he knows. The dog had been better than any human he had fucking met. Since leaving prison, the dog had been with him all the time. He was paiainting out of his house, a skill he picke dup in prison, and even had an agent--which all came as a surprise to him and he half expected it to all disappear soon.

He was doing something crazy, that was for damn sure. Driving fifty miles up to Chicago, where the gang was that broke into his car, took his dog, and forced her fight. The cops pretty much said they could do nothing and he knew right then why he was still alive. Why he survived the war, why he made it trhough the gray hell of prison, why he let himself keep living when every day seemed like there was something new to suffer about. He read the papers, had always given a shit . . . prison had given him the guts to do this, he knew. The same gang had given him troubles during his stint. During his intake, the social worker told him that if he didn't ask for protective custody, they'd be ganging up on him that night.b He blamed them for all those hours alone... his art grew however, and he was a model prisoner, allowed to use the internet in the library. That was where he ran across the psycho killers hit list, a half comedy site selling the paintings of a collective of artists and writings. The site made him laugh more than he had or did in prison.





They would have raped if he hadn't asked for solitary. The i

Jimmy represents the scul



ME: Okay, fuck head, what are you doing? You're 43, no kids, no money, no really, really cool paintings of great publications... nothing extrodinary at all, except an extended bout of forever studentdom.

I: Is this just meant to destroy my buzz, or do you have a point?

ME: You have to find meanings, however small, to become your signposts, obviously.... like the bikers who are civilized by kids. Made up or not, looking forward to something seems, scientifically speaking, to have profound effects on our emotional states during the day. We all know what the night before christmas was like, we just underjudge how often that feeling follows us throughout our life, coming up invisible and taking control of you and making you buy some damn thing or another... or in this case, writing a book. Once you get the outline shored up, you are ready to do what you really love, which is to make up, live in, the scenes I write.

I: Yea, so you keep telling me. You know, when I did that draft where I laid out every bit of action, the one that led to the final draft, I was writing by hand in a taxi, late at night... doors locked so I could check out customers before letting them into my sanctuary. I think this hand writing led me to a more clear path than the computer does. For some reason in here, I get little bits of this and that, then lost them, rewrite them, etc.... right now I need one file that has a synopsis, character descriptions, basic outlines for the various scenes, and
needed










ALL WRITING IN HERE IS THE PROPERTY OF JOHN SCOTT RIDGWAY, AND YOU CAN GET MY PERMISSION TO PERFORM AND REPRINT WITH AN EMAIL. Steal from me and you will be cursed in such a way that your hands turn into worthless, jelly fish like appendages that sting your intimates.