#20

I used to think that bad critics had to be answered, that one's bounden duty is to couch one's lance and mow down idiot critics and their malformed ideas before their bad medicine infects any innocents.

But you're never gonna stop crap reading and lazy thinking and bad faith. Their value by the pound and the cost of manufacture will always make them an easy investment, and people love things that are easy more than they love anything else. The only critics that matter live behind your eyes and write inside your skull, so best be careful how you censor them, and what coin you pay them with.

Still, however much my tongue stays bitten, whenever I read some correct-tone sucker being so wrong about so much and making a highfalutin' rep off their stunted abilities, in my mind I marshal the banners, and the sun gleams brightly off the points.

My books are available for the most ferocious and even baseless of criticisms. I don't give a fuck as long as they get read.

*

When I was a kid my parents took me up the Andes mountains a fair few times, the northernmost part of the range. They're amazing mountains, really weird places with fantastic, nigh-unrealistic stuff like giant condors gliding around, and pits of ice-cold water with surface greenery that look exactly like the solid-rooted scrub around them, eye and foot giving no warning as to their presence.

In the little villages up the in the passes and clustered on the plateaus, the most notable structures are still the chapels, some of them more than three hundred years old, near wishing wells even older. I saw a passion procession once when we were up there Easter time, winding its way down the steep cobbled streets. The kid Roman soldier was ceaselessly yelling out a careful cadence of abuse, whipping the shit out of kid Jesus with a circus strap that cracked like snapping seasoned wood but had no stinging power. Kid Jesus shambled along bent under his big cross, all wrapped in white linens with fake bloodstains running down them, long wig under fake thorns hiding his face, surrounded by kid apostles and kid saints and kid bystanders. I say kids; they were Big Kids to me at the time. Couldn't have been more than thirteen, any of them. The bystanders and saints threw spring flowers all over each other, and kid Jesus, and the street, and so did some of the people lining the streets to watch them go by, flowers all along the stones. And kid Roman soldier ever whipping, eyes blazing, reminding.

I had my first bout of constipation up those mountains, and strained for perhaps a whole hour to bring forth a perfectly round ball of hardened shit that could have been shot from a small cannon. It was the first ailment of my life that had me thinking I might die; I remember the sweat dripping from the end of my nose, between my legs and into the water, wishing I could crack my butt open like an egg.


--JL