Number 51 your time is up

I opened the original unedited manuscript of Thee Royal Trux Text (TRTXTXT) and I cut out 16,000 words. These were all about me (surprise) and they’re going into my auto-hagiography “Scrimshaw”. Of the 30,000 words of TRTXTXT that are left I reconfigured them in a linear fashion. There are 12,000 words about the actual gigs and 18,000 about rock criticism. Luckily, or perhaps obsessively, I still have all the notebooks and plenty of unused material. There was an appendix about the “pound for pound” tour called: “a gay in NY is just a fag in Atlanta” that’s gonna be included. It doesn’t exist on any discs so I have to retype it. This is a good thing because I need positive things to do to keep me occupied right now. My house is trashed. My personal relationships are all in shambles. I really did it this time. This time. As I re-read parts of the manuscript I’m not surprised to see me acting exactly the same 10 years ago. My cyclical flip out contains: the paranoia, the grandiosity, my dismissive postures, my purple anger and rage. Dangermouse & Sparklehorse really pegged it when they had Wayne Coyne sing: “the more I try to hurt you, the more it hurts me.” I write publicly about my breakdowns but only the date’s change. Everyone else seems to have moved along in their lives and I remain a skipping record. I’m so enamored of tape loops that I’ve finally become one. I was convinced that writing was an emotional emetic and the documentation of these bleak days would help inoculate me from future outbreaks. Instead I let the tapes play on, over and over, as I prepared an essay about the necessity of repetition and minimalism in post-industrial western society. My drug use became a post-fluxus, neo-neoistic gesture instead of just a waste. My allusion to magick, creativity and love under will become just that: illusion. Like most writers I talk a good game. Like most losers I’m able to analyze my failures precisely and specifically-as long as my part of the equation is negated. It’s easy for me to make pretentious references to electric mysticism and the need to disconnect from rational thought. Then I remind myself that the village shaman was often scorned. He was scorned because his so called alternative states of consciousness were just a cover for being an asshole. The village was simply too busy living their lives to deal with his “messages”, no matter how ornately he carved them into the bones and teeth of whales. The gift shop was crowded. The mood stabilizers have really gotten on top of me. I’m on a low dose too. I wrote in long hand for hours last night. I’m working on Chapter 51 of ‘Scrimshaw’ which is a collage of material from the first draft of the Royal Trux book (1999), my novel “Your Love is the Beauty of Death” (1995) and last weekend (2010). It amazes me that the material segues together so well. According to Crowley, 51 is the number of pain, sadness and loss. No coincidence that in the Zeppelin movie the money was stolen from box number 51. Nor is it a coincidence that a woman I thought I was in love with used to have post office box number 51. Remember that version of “careful with that axe Eugene” titled “come in number 51 your time is up”? Burroughs called these coincidences and parallel universes “the place of dead roads” because they lead absolutely no where. About an hour after I finished reading that book I met my first wife in Pittsburgh. True story. I gotta get some coffee. I gotta take a shower. I gotta start typing up the notes from yesterday. I was just editing the chapter about seeing RTX in Athens Ohio. Those of you concerned about my well-being, the Latin word Perdurabo means: “I’ll endure to the end.” I ain’t worried.