| ZYGOTE IN MY COFFEE.COM |
| ***BIO*** KARL KOWESKI: I'm a 31 year old displaced Chicagoan, now living on top of a mountain in Alabama for reasons that involve a woman. I was the lead singer/banjo player of the now defunct country/punk/disco band The Screaming Shits. Now I just work in a machine shop and write articles for porno mags. |
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| © 2006 zygoteinmycoffee Ink. |
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| Small Press Prodigy |
| by Karl Koweski |
| Garot Silver awoke fully intending to spend the day writing. There was the novel/memoir he was working on “Gloryholes in the Walls of Heaven; One Man’s Odyssey To Find The Anonymous Mr. Right”. Thirty thousand words into the book he’d hit an insurmountable wall. The protagonist had just landed at the San Francisco International Airport with a three hour layover before his connecting flight. And there the story petered out. Garot had never flown, never so much as stepped foot in an airport. Any airport.
He wracked his memory for movie scenes featuring airports, and, even more importantly, airport bathrooms. Where experience failed, imagination remained conspicuous in its absence. Garot hoped to sharpen his creativity with a few short stories so that he might return to the book and bore a hole straight through the novelistic writer’s block. The short stories, though, weren’t fairing much better. Actually, all he had were fragments of stories, shards of dialogue and shreds of characters forming what would become a canticle detailing the trials and tribulations of an eighteen year old literary genius. And he’d call the whole damn thing “The Reticulated Musings From The Ineluctable Void”. In the meantime there was the poetry and it was some of the best verse the small press would ever have the privilege to publish if certain editors would only remove certain heads from certain asses. He liked to keep his poetry simple and focused on what he termed “The 3 Ds”. Drinking, Dicking and Dying. Every once in a while he’d get to feeling froggy and pen the occasional ode to horse racing or working in the post office. Garot felt a poem brewing at the moment, something he planned to title “God is Dog Spelled Backward” which was going to be a blistering attack on organized religion, denouncing all forms of worship and questioning the very existence of god/allah/ buddah/you name it. It was going to make people stand up and take notice. It was going to open lines of communication between internet connected people all over the country. It was going to put the name Garot Silver on the small press map. He fired up the computer and went straight to the Word Scoundrel message board. There were six new comments berating his poetry, masculinity, ancestry and the questionable house training of his dachsund/collie, Henry Charles Bukowski III. Pride and anger swelled in his chest, wrestling for emotional dominance Greco-Roman style. The six messages were left by six different monikers, but Garot knew this legion of literary demons were only one. Phillipe DiGiorno. Editor of Word Scoundrel, enemy of small press scribes everywhere. Take the first comment left by Milo Yardcock, an obvious pseudonym. “Garot Silver writes like a dog vomiting up its stomach lining after lapping up a bowl full of Drano. Please stop posting your attempts at poetry on the message board.” It got worse. The second missive came from Hessekiah who might’ve been Amish had it not been for the fact that he was assaulting him on the message board of a literary web journal. “Garot Silver, there’s a reason we refuse to accept the ‘poetry’ you submit. Mostly it’s because it reads like the writings of a six year old who’s recently been molested by a Bukowski imitator. It’s the same reason we don’t want to read the horseshit you post on the message board.” It got worse. Elephantine Amsterdam’s opinions were especially irking. “Garot trees the concrete chord of Wichita Falls. Morose. Paper boots in a sea of confetti. Dismal rain pounds the hearts in my eyes.” Elephantine’s message like his/her/it’s stories made absolutely no fucking sense. It was like William Burroughs shot some heroin then instructed his autistic nephew to jot down random words heard during an episode of Supernatural. Yet why did small press peons every where fall over themselves praising and publishing Elephantine’s meaningless typer ejaculations while Garot’s exquisitely crafted poetry was tied in a sack like newborn kittens and drown in a river of contempt and envy? When he innocently posited this question on the Word Scoundrel message board, DiGiorno’s alter egos came out of the woodwork to call him a jackass, detonating explosives at the abutments of his own literary bridges to humanity. It was unfair. It was mean. It was more attention than his work had ever previously garnered. The last post basically claimed that Garot sodomized Bukowski, both the poet and the dog. It went on to claim that his mother was also his sister, and his poetry was actually journal entries cut up to look like verse. These opinions came courtesy of Your Mother’s Anal Rampage who seemed more interested in insulting Garot rather than offering any sort of constructive criticism that might help Garot grow and improve as a writer. It was all very draining. Garot flexed his fingers and typed: “DiGiorno/Yardcock/Hessekiah/Elephantine/Rampage... You went a long way with these latest posts toward proving my point rather than whatever points you were trying to prove. You have an infantile mindset and it’s all rather pathetic that you would rather showcase your own piss poor attempts at literature under the guise of several childish pseudonyms rather than publish the works of a real true to life scribe such as myself. This is the last time I’m going to post here. I refuse to degrade myself here by stooping to your level any longer. In closing, I’d like to say: Fuck you. And when I’m a rich and famous writer living on the French Riviera with my battalion of man servants, you’ll be saying – I knew Garot Silver when he was a young and promising wonder boy.” Basically, it was the same post he left yesterday, just worded slightly different. He clicked off the web page and sat there a moment. The novel. The short stories. The poems. The novel, the short stories, or the poem. The lady or the tiger. Garot set the notebook aside and jumped back on Internet Explorer. He clicked on the Literati Loco message board. There were three more antagonistic messages left for him. He wondered what the jackasses at Scriptsaw Lit Journal, Mannlicher Poetry Review and Lugubrious Mementoes had to say about him. And so the day passed. Again. |
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