My new routine is get up, do chores, sit in front of the computer for four hours organizing my notes on Evernote and telling myself I’m doing some deep thinking here.

I just wrote some new stuff for my Trapper John story, and I guess that was twenty minutes out of the time that I spent messing around on my computer. I guess I’m kind of conflicted about this whole thing because on the one hand, I’m having a mental battle against all these ideas about productivity I put together over the years and on the other hand I spend all this time thinking and then when it’s time to go to work I feel like I wasted my time. I guess I should stop trusting my feelings. Twenty minutes on a story I wrote last year is a good thing if I ever actually publish the damn thing.

I want to stop there and say, is publication the goal, or is making a good story the goal? Well, there is no goal, and if you stop to ask what the goal for everything is, you eventually ask until you get back to the beginning of time and you wonder why we’re all really alive anyway, and that question never makes me feel any better. I’m thinking I should base my life on something arbitrary, like money, say, and leave it at that.

Williamsburg is a hotbed of highly manipulated botanical installations

In that case, yes, publication is the goal. I will make someone else publish this goddamn story somewhere. I don’t care if it’s the most rinkidink-ass shit you never heard of. If you’ve got any suggestions, let me know.

I changed it so there aren’t any cops in the story, just a mob of people that want this John the Trapper guy dead because he’s clearly weird and a guy has mysteriously died. Marley is a necromancer who is worried what the dead guy, Snoops, will be capable of if he comes back from the dead. It’s all based around the scene at the pub with the cat shit bag delivery.

I don’t know what the market is for this kind of story since I understand nothing about markets. I’m going to change that, though, by God, I’m going to become a goddamn master of the markets. I’m going to be a corporate tycoon. I’m going to sail my skyscraper across the nations, making weird valleys and phantasmagorical ridges as I raze the landscape like a giant, vindictive glacier.