Letter 3.54

Sometimes after reading your flights of fancy, all very clever and what-not I feel like a dung beetle busy rolling my little piece of shit in an unimaginative and mundane manner, just trying to get to wherever it is I'm trying to get to. Plodding. But those clouds that you swoop in and out of, and roll up into balls, and push them to wherever it is you're trying to get to -- they're too light and airy for a stolid down-to-earth (in-the-ground?) type like me, who, though not unimaginative, prefers to imagine things with lots of gristle, and whose imagination is constrained, perhaps – 'flightless'?

I've read Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, and liked it mucho, but now must -- with a bit of anxiety -- not read Another Roadside Attraction lest I find myself using up energy in going around non-existent obstacles. Or do they exist? Like waking up in the morning to find an elephant in your room...good grief... Just the other day someone asked me if I'd read so-and-so's account of when he was a Buddhist monk.

There's been talk of Achan Cha going to Vancouver, but I guess not. Yes, Groucho would have had a terrible time if he wasn't there. And when a wealthy dowager looked down 6 yards of nose at Stan Laurel to tell him how delighted she was to meet him, he replied, 'I'm not either'. Ah well. If I get the energy I may send you an unpublished short talk of his (A.C. not S.L.), which will at least help keep the P.O. solvent. I'm not pushing him like I was Ñānavīra, mind you, but... well, I liked the old gaffer, and he seemed to be pretty sharp. You won't find any Big Macism in him.

Bones still needs to get hold of the right piece of gristle here and there. Trouble is, cloud-gristle is so hard to get a hook into.

But you got a hook -- a nail -- in a package of dates? Were you charged extra? A special on Khomeini Suppositories?

When I was in Guatemala there was a S.F. fag type who claimed to be Tom Robbins, and who did a very effective impersonation, but who was probably a fake. Perhaps Another Roadside Attraction is also a fake? This fake T.R. said that his next book would be called 'Divorces'. Sounds like Siamese twins are only half as Siamese as once believed, I haven't heard from my agent in nearly a year. Maybe he died? Maybe I can help? Maybe I did?

Abrazon,

V.