The other evening, the niece I have acquired on my way to perdition notified me of her desperate need to write. But, her outraged text message squawked, she did not know about what. It was, not to put too fine a point on it, a little-girl foot-stamp of a demand that I, her Uncle, (n.b. upper case), do something about it. It should be noted here that upper case avuncularity imposes a host of responsibilities that include, Wisdom, Good Humor, terry-cloth clad shoulders, and the willingness to pick up the tab for an occasional evening of blues, booze and bullshit.

My response, something to the effect that desperation was not the same thing as wanting and that reason could be relied on to greater affect, was, I thought, all of the above, and more, what with having to deal with text speak and all.

Then, this morning, as I sit, transfixed by the accusing blink of the cursor on a pristine New Document (untitled) screen, I have realized that I was being altogether too glib and in so doing might well have distracted one whose attention span has been likened to that of a meth addicted butterfly. Although, it now occurs to me that the glibness did have a kernel, perhaps even more than one, of truth in it. Desperation is of the emotions and smells of, y’know, teen spirit, all feelings, hormones and incoherence; not a particularly successful recipe for, well, almost anything, leave alone literature. Simply vomiting one’s emotional stirrings into prose ...well, what you end up with is Joyce’s Ulysses; comprehensible, one supposes, but only in an n-dimension m-brane sort of way.  Not exactly my cup of scotch but then again, if I’m so smart how come I’m not rich, eh? Desperation, it seems to me, is wanting gone rancid from too long an immersion in the snake-brain.

That’s what I should have said to her; and let her work out the rest for herself.