Beginning to Begin.

This began in The City but will begin in K-town. Jack found himself in K-town not by accident but suddenly aware of middle-age, his own, and suddenly aware of being desparately alone ... not lonely, but alone. Previously, none of this had bothered him or mattered much as the recognition of being always seemed enough. But, now, for now he saw himself as a thing outside of himself -- an other even to his I. Though still contained within his self, himself, this other seemed a mismatch -- outside of his body, or how he understood it... It was as it was... Is as it is, as this is being written now, a postscript to the sensation, an epilogue to the saga that ends here. He had not thought to write the saga before this, until now ... For, this is Jack waxing. The saga had until now belonged to a separate tradition, a less literate tradition based in bar-time anecdotes, name-dropping, and non-sequential storytelling... blabber really. Still, Jack hoped, hopes to re-fabricate the myth here -- to rewrite, edit the self toward itself -- to cut and paste the I upon its absence here -- from memory and what occurs in the immediate... Blasted, mixed, commingled -- a mongrel constitution more significant to his own well-being than that of any reader, any possible reader, editor, or critic.

This, then, is today, any day, written through contemporaneous moments of inspiration and invention... Desperate, nostalgic, and cynically optimistic ... forgetting the immediate at the expense of the living moment, the living monument -- architecturally, a mausoleum ... mortar and marble, stacks of children's blocks, a wood framed shanty ... the ticky-tacky flat of the now and ever more, ever been ... a mixtry of hereness and thereness -- knowing neither.