I’ve been fading into the background of our farmhouse lately, disconnecting the USB cable from the back of my neck and contemplating my next move. Watching the stats of Fiercely Interdependent peak and flatline and peak again, this time with a smaller peak, and then burp and fizzle and meander, I listen to the autumn rain steadily soak the pastures as a goat, separated from his flock, his herd, his gaggle, his posse–whatever a goat social group is called–as he mournfully bleats at the moon and his loss and the mud and for someone (that would be me and my wife, the farmer/goatherd having gone home or somewhere else for the night, and not picking up his phone), someone to please help, I am struck by how good my life is right now. That despite–despite? or in conjunction with?–not holding a straight job at the moment. Life is good. So says my mug of coffee, sitting to my left as I type this, tepidly warm, with a graphic design dog that’s fetched a newspaper printed on it (a sort of magic in its own right, that technology allows people to mass produce ceramic items like mugs with crisply-defined images on them as if they were pieces of paper or posterboard). On the reverse side of this mug, if there is such a thing to a cylinder, is the proclamation:  ”Do what you like. Like what you do.”

That was once a novel idea to me, but now I am actively making it my reality. A trickle of income from online book sales and a lot of time to read and create, that’s what I’ve got. That’s my work. Granted, I could still use a straight job for steady income and stability, but let’s be honest here, straight jobs don’t fit me very well. I could try to fool you and act the part, but I think we all need to see something novel, creative, beautiful or startling, alive and vital, not just another straight job cog in the crunching machine of consumer and corporate capitalist culture. Besides, when I’m that cog, I’m a disgruntled, passionless, and bitter cog.

So instead, these days I’m reading Chinweizu’s The West and the Rest of Us: White Predators, Black Slavers and the African Elite (published in 1975; review forthcoming), and thinking, apart from the “life is good” sentiments of my individual existence, that the world is just as, if not more, fucked-up than I always intuitively felt it was. Granted, “always” is always an exaggeration (even now); a more accurate statement would be to say that the diseased state of the world, which suffers from short-sighted technological humans, continues to disturb and concern me, and as I learn more about the foibiles and willful injustices of Euro-centric history, I occasionally still despair and cuss at the arrogance of “culture”.  On a lighter note, I’m also reading Best New Horror 4 (published in 1993, but full of horror from 1992; it’s not new at all, but that’s the title and we’re sticking to it; no review planned), discovering Poppy Z. Brite and Thomas Ligotti and their excellent stories “How to Get Ahead in New York” and “The Glamour”, respectively, within its pages. And with both these books in my hands, I’m seeking some balance between these ever-present social concerns of justice, self-determination, equality, liberty–you know, our shared American values, right?–and my deepening need for this farmhouse and this room and the rural space and my pens and imagination and books and the space here where all of that converges in a matrix of music and dancing self-actualization, and I’m all like, “Damn, who has time for a job? There’s so much work to do!”

The Sentiments and other stories is slated for