What?

According to legend, Jack Kerouac famously believed that editing is for pussies. Self censorship, he called it. Going back, fixing words, making them pretty -- that's like wearing a condom when you masturbate. I don't know if he'd put in such a charming fashion as that...

But the idea is, if you're all worried about being pretty, you're going to fuck up what you're trying to say. Maybe that's it.

Honestly, I've always avoided reading Kerouac, because I found him impenetrable, bland, and etcetera.

Recently, I bought a copy of Dharma Bums. I have yet to open it. I read the first few opening lines. And lately the idea of not worrying so goddamn much about every word makes sense to me. There is a rhythm in stream of consciousness. That sort of dance can come natural, if, like me, you usually spend hours going over every sentence and breaking it like taming a wild horse.

So why not just let it flow, sometimes? Why not let the horse run wild? Maybe I've tamed so many sentences, they don't all need to be wearing saddles and all that accouterment shit.

See, so long as I am revisiting all the rules, picking them up, weighing them, trying to figure out where the rule came from, who stuck this in my head... So long as I am reevaluating all the rules, why not reevaluate the literary rules I live by too?

Why not? Why must my art be this? Why must my writing be that? Why does God need a starship, to quote the worst and the best Star Trek movie ever made?

Can you even tell I didn't polish each of these sentences until they struck me as decent enough to let out of the stable, to gallop all around the internet, in a meaty merry-go-round of writing shit?

You can't tell. That's the sweet irony. Agonizing and agonizing and rewriting and editing and carving the sentences, when I can just let them grow all by themselves without trying to warp them into something else.

Fuck you, Kerouac. You goddamn brilliant bastard. I assume you are brilliant, though I have read very little by you.

(There's a new barking dog in my neighbourhood and he just started barking and he's not going to stop. I am going to go outside now and rip his fucking head off and shove it up his ass. Oh great, now another dog is barking. A fucking chorus of retarded, territorial animals in fenced-in backyards, yelling nothing at the sky. Just like me and my typing, I guess, so who am I to fault that stupid, fucking, annoying dog?)

Oh. They stopped. That's better.

Now I forget what I was saying.