A Bildungsroman

i saw raymond carver walking through the aisles of my local bookstore and i wanted to kill him. having long since mastered the eastern art of breathanarism and (what need of food, words, thoughts, ideas ...plato got in wrong up in that cave. if only he had been drunk on grecian wine, as the greeks tended to dilute their wine...)

now he studies blackholes and anti-gravity, anti-matter etc. a decade spent exploring the repertoire of the cape verdians, tuva singers and yugoslavic folk singers, screamers...chastising arvo part for his theoires tintinnabulism, addicted to stockhausen and his filters, (twain and other american minimalists, the procession of european influnced american literature to the state of non-existance, to the point of nothing, of having nothing to say...the death of the hero, the birth of the anti hero, caufield etc.) death of the comma his eyes musing, harping on some dylan lyric...

siding with kurtz, he dismisses the western canon and concerning urban fiction, he sides with toqueville and laments the downfall of the brahmins.

in pigtails, braces and abject horror, a bookseller, second cousin to sister carrie, fends of his request for a bible in a algonquin.

do not fear...there are brief interludes of genius, quips and insights into bartleby, sources of and inspirations for ahabs pain, embelishments on the moral of jonah...all of which fall on deaf ears.

his face is the sad decaying face of quetzalcoatl, tired and overgrown and unweeded, weary of defeat and wary of historians, critics and college coeds, till the accolades pour fourth in rich profusion and stinging affirmation. his gate that of sisyphus on an never ending bender perusing transportation and lamenting the demise of (?)

used to be, he quips to a homeless man in sexuality, a wall of chilton, cobra kits and steve's triumph, von dutch and his pawngrade flute..."i am captain hilts afore the barbed wire..!" "i knew them," he gestures "i knew them all!" "a triumph tr6 650 it wore...painstakingly and lovingly disguissed as a bmw r75..."

[they say steve capitualated in the end, aping marlon and jimmy dean with a little oscar wilde thrown in for good measure]

in desktop and web development he pauses...(something about html, something about an 8088, something about wordstar...something about...)(YINK YINK YINK...)"mmmmmmm....injuns..!"
and he is promptly asked to vacate the premises

i saw raymond carver at my local bookstore ordering a wet cappucino and a turkey caprese on facoccia with a starbucks giftcard he found in travel.  the barista informs him that starbucks traditionaly serves a wet capucinno by default and that this is indeed a barnes and noble cafe serving starbucks coffee...his card is not welcome here.  the look is his eyes is pure miasma and charles bukowski and with the gait of a welshman, he suanters off into the night and the mid-week traffic in search of gentler climes