If you got kicked out of Ontario FOREVER, would it bother you? Would you try to sneak back in?
Provincial Pride, Pollock, Pickle Lake, Exile, & Flowers, & the usual digressions...
I: WHAT IF? (ONTARIO EDITION)
Provincial pride.
Hard to give a fuck about a randomly drawn line.
Can you call to mind the Ontario flag? Can you see it in your mind’s eye or would you have to look it up?
You’re not engaged enough in this. Fine.
Then let’s play WHAT IF? (ONTARIO EDITION).
What if somebody (or somebodies) abducted you in the middle of the night, threw you in the back of a van (one with a mattress though, I wouldn’t want you severely uncomfortable in this theoretical situation), and then drove you, a highly proud or highly ambivalent Ontarioan (Ontarioite? Ontariarian) to the Manitoba, Quebec, New York State or Michigan border, tossed you (lightly) outta the van, handed you $12 000 and said:
“You are banned from Ontario for the rest of your natural life.”
“I’m talkin’ Capulet-Montague style banishment, capeesh? You go can wherever you want, anywhere in the world, except for anywhere in Ontario for the rest of your life. You can never come back.”
“What are the consequences if I do sneak back?”
The dude, who is like Tyrus or Victor from Breaking Bad, just stares at you. Which means you don’t wanna know.
How would you feel? Would exile make you like Ontario more? Or would you just miss your life, the bubble, the route to work, the little mini Sim City that was your existence, ands that seemed to have nothing whatsoever to do with the vast subarctic region of pine trees stretching thousands of kilometres northwards, farther than you can even travel. The road (Ontario Highway 599) literally ends at Pickle Lake, which is about 6 hours north of Thunder Bay. Look at where Pickle Lake is on the map.
So that’s the last town in Ontario…and there’s still hundreds of kilometres between downtown Pickle Lake - which, as you can see from this photograph, is positively bustling with three people - and James Bay, which is the southern bay of the larger body of water, Hudson Bay.
So. A life in Manitoba or Quebec. Or anywhere else. Or try to sneak home.
WHAT WOULD YOU DO?
Oh, btw…here’s me and my friends @ the Manitoba border in 2006:
And here’s me @ Lake Superior in 2003. I don’t know if this is actually true, but I’ve read it from six different sources, and all six say that Lake Superior is deep enough that if you somehow were able to yank up its volume & spread it around, it would flood all of North America in 1 to 2 feet of water? They’re not sure if it’s 1 or 2, but either is…mind blowing to me. I wish I could say I was thinking such rich, deep thoughts in the below photograph, but prolly not. I was definitely excited tho, just 17 years old and driving across the country with my 3 best friends, 2 Ryans & an Andrew.
Anyway, what would you do?
As for me….I’d probably start afresh somewhere else and never come back.
II: Onnnnntaaaaaarioooo, our own provincial land…
Provincial pride.
We don’t have much of that here in Canada, do we?
We do have provincial hatred & jealousy.
People who don’t live in Ontario hate Ontario. No one in Ontario knows why. Or even cares. Many of us aren’t even aware that we are hated for being from Ontario. Maybe that’s why they hate us. Not because we don’t care that they hate us, but because we don’t even know that they hate us.
But it’s not like we’re not especially proud to be from, or live in, Ontario. I’ve not had a singe conversation with a fellow Ontarian regarding what living in Ontario is like, or how we feel about it.
Most of the time we’re not even aware of the fact that we stand on Ontarian soil. Or Ontarian cement. It is the local (whether municipal, suburban or rural) that affects & controls our day-to-day lives far more than anything at the provincial or federal level. Yet, unless you’re talking to a waiter about the local whatever-the-fuck the restaurant you’re in cooks, the local always gets the short shrift doesn’t it? Did you vote in your last municipal election? Have you ever voted in one? (I have…once, in 2010. It was the election Rod Ford won.) From the announcements of candidacy to election day itself, municipal elections always get less press coverage, less water cooler talk, less everything. I find this odd. Can you even name the last 3 mayors of your city?
I’m not trying to make you feel like an idiot. I’m just making the point that we’re both blind to the invisible operations of the cities we live in and blind to the larger machinations of the provincial, by which I mean when exhausted-looking premiers announce BIG shit like hydroelectric dams or pipelines nobody wants or education budgets slashed. The exhausted expression on every Premier’s face always seems disproportionate to the amount of time you & I spend giving a shit about Ontario. Or whatever is being announced. Our previous Premier was so embattled by the end of her term. And I imagine she was pretty embittered on Election Day. I think she won her riding but her party, the Liberals, took such a historic beating that they lost official party status.
When that happened, I spent about ten minutes thinking about it. Then I remembered the old provincial motto.
Ontario: Yours To Discover.
I love it. The way it nudges you toward some kind of action, to get out there and see what the fuck the province looks like. Go see Rattlesnake Point (and get over your phobia of Points & Snakes in a single day, quipped my friend Eric Lister. That’s one of my favourite jokes ever. Lister’s hilarious. One time I saw him and said “Eric! How are ya?” and he said “Better than you.”
Maybe you had to be there. Yours To Discover is so obviously a relic of the push toward individuality in the 1970s. This province is yours. Now get out there & see what you can find. The new motto is more of a command. Smacks of parental supervision.
Ontario: Keep It Beautiful.
As in: We’re watching you, punk! Don’t fuck this place up! Slow down. Wear your helmet. Stoop & Scoop (this one I agree with, we can’t have dogshit fuckin everywhere). However, here’s an unnecessary experience I had once:
“Do you know why I pulled you over?”
“No, officer.”
“Your license plate sticker expires in twelve days.”
I frowned. “Which means it’s still legal.”
“I know that!” he roared. I flinched. “I. Know. That. I’m just telling you. Your license plate expires. In twelve days.”
What I wanted to say: “Thank you officer! I’ll make sure to get my sticker replaced eleven days from now.”
What I said: “Thank you officer! I’ll get that sticker replaced as soon as possible.”
He handed me back my license, insurance, and registration with a look of disgust suggesting those items were akin, in his mind, to a jar of piss.
Ladies & gentlemen & those who identify otherwise: Your Ontario Provincial Police at work. I’m not complaining. I’m a white man. I got off easy. See, Ontario & Quebec are the only provinces rich enough to afford their own police forces (oh just imagine what that money could do if we just had Mounties like every other province! We could…get potable water to reservations! We could…stop letting Catholic schools & churches pay their fair fucking share!
I don’t even want to know how many starlight tours the OPP have given to young indigenous men and women. Actually, I do want to know. We should know how many Indigenous peoples the OPP have murdered with impunity.
Starlight tours are said to be done only out west, so much so that the Wikipedia page for these events says “Saskatoon Freezing Deaths.”
That’s bullshit.
Does violence occur only out West?
Do people only do drugs outside of this little haven we call Ontario?
All it takes is one officer to be having a bad winter day to drive someone in custody to a remote location, strip them of their outerwear & drive away.
See, it’s murder but it’s not murder. “All I did was take his jacket.”
It’s killing someone without even touching them.
That’s Godlike power.
And we think the OPP is somehow immune to that kind of power?
Hah.
I guess we are On-terrible
III: Defending Ontario
In 1866, a regiment of Irishmen invaded Ontario, & other parts of Canada, for some dumb reason. If the Micks were trying to affect the outcome of the American Civil War, they were a full year late, for that war had ended when General Robert E. Lee surrendered to General Ulysses S. Grant @ the Appomattox Court House in Virginia on May 9 1865. Grant did not execute or otherwise mistreat Confederate soldiers despite telling Lee that nothing other than his unconditional surrender would be accepted. Accepting an “Unconditional surrender” is risky, because there is no guarantee that you and your regiment will not be executed. So Lee must really have run out of options. This lead to newspapers saying that Grant’s first two initial’s stood for “unconditional surrender,” and all was peaceful in those re-United States of America for FIVE WHOLE DAYS until an actor named John Wilkes Both assassinated Abraham Lincoln & the country resumed its tradition of random violence, hucksterism, & traveling snake-oil salesmen shooting dogs.
ANYWAY these random Irish skirmishes came to be known as the Fenian Raids. They weren’t enough soldiers or people on either side to classify the enterprise as a battle. Those who feel strongly enough about this should write their MP asking to get the name changed from “Raids” to “Skirmishes.” I grew up being taught that the Irish kicked our Canadian butts. But one look at the statistics tells a different story:
Fenian Raids: Casualties & Losses
Irish killed in Action: 24
Irish wounded: 48
Irish captured: 59
1 cannon seized from the Irish
Canadians killed in action: 13
Canadians wounded: 58, 22 of whom died. Figures for wounded Irish who died are not available, but I’m sure it was more than 0.
Canadians captured: 54
So we captured and killed more of them than they did of us. They did wound more, but is that the criterion on which winners of war is decided? Doubt it. Anyway, let’s get back to modern times.
Now, this question is only for people from Ontario: Would you fight someone for making fun of Ontario within your earshot?
I wouldn’t. I don’t like Ontario enough to risk a beating.
I even kinda dislike Ontario sometimes.
I remember thinking “Oh yeah, we’re in Ontario now…where everything is bureaucratic and lame” when, having just crossed into Ontario from Manitoba (my band was driving home from an arduous 6-week tour), the speed limit immediately dropped from 100km/h to 90 km/h even though it was the exact same highway with the exact same number of lanes and the exact same ecological surroundings…taiga basically, which is jack pine forest with spruce and bogs and rocks.
So why the ten kilometre speed drop? Because Ontario.
So I guess those who hate it are right. I don’t like slowing down to 90 after cruising through 3 whole provinces @ a nice & breezy 100 km/h clip.
Now, they are rivalries here, but most rivalries in Ontario are with other Ontario teams, like the Sens-Leafs rivalry. The Battle of Ontario. This year’s Montreal-Toronto series didn’t have any intensity to it, but that’s prolly bcuz of the lack of ppl in the stands.
But there is no Ontario team in any sport. I have no provincial pride in me, whatsoever. The Ontario…Rockheads! No, sports teams are either federal, like Team Canada, or municipal, like Hamilton Bulldogs (AHL), the Erie Otters (OHL), and the now-defunct Brampton Capitals (OJHL).
So. No Ontario sports team to get behind. That’s one reason for our apathy. But not everyone watches sports. There are other reasons. 90% of people who live in this province live within 100 km of the United States.
If anything, there’s a North Ontario v Southern Ontario rivalry. One Southerners are not aware of, just like we’re not aware of every other province hating us.
I admit to feeling a slight defensive bristle when I heard a white dread-headed dickhead named “Tray,” lol, from B.C. call it “On-terrible” but I don’t bristle when I hear it on Trailer Park Boys nor do I care when/if the Maritimes guys say it. They've enough troubles as have-nots. Plus, I like 'em.
Hitchhiked New Brunswick summer 2008. Made a brief piss stop. “Where do I…go?” I asked my driver.
“Ah just on those lobster traps there.”
Only in the Maritimes.
ANYWAY in 2007, hitching Westward this time (“Go West, young man.")
I met a dude in Dryden, ON who told me he “gets in bar fights with Manitoba dudes all the time.”
I balked. “What? Seriously? The Manitoba border is 3 hours away.”
A broad shrug and a slug of Bud.
A real Ontarian wouldn’t drink Bud. A rice-based beer.
I didn’t believe him.
III: Rainy River, ON & the Rolling Stones
A few days later I met a very old man at a bar in Rainy River, ON, a town I liked so much I wrote a song about it. It’s about an hour from Manitoba. The old man told me his favourite Rolling Stones album was Flowers.
Now, I’m a serious Stones fan, or at least I thought I was…I’m mostly into the Jimmy Miller period though, I’ll admit: That’s Beggars Banquet (1968), Let It Bleed (1969), Sticky Fingers (1971), Exile on Main St. (1972) and Goats Head Soup (1973).
I have much affection & sympathy for Jimmy Miller, who developed a heroin addiction so debilitating he couldn't sit behind the boards for the Stones anymore. Which is why their next album was so sacrilegious. It's Only Rock 'n Roll.
Only rock 'n roll? The world's self-styled, and self-named greatest rock 'n roll band denigrating via that dismissive “only” on their bullshit 1974 album.
They dropped Jimmy like a rock once he got too fucked up. He managed to produce a pair of Motorhead albums (Lemmy was prolly feeding him uppers to counteract the heroin.)
So the Stones said goodbye to the man who helmed the board for their best music.
And now suddenly it's “only,” “merely,” “ roc” rock 'n rock 'n roll?
That's like saying “it's only a habitable planet.” Or “it's only oxygen.”
But the Stones DID have some pre-Jimmy Miller gems. “I'd Much Rather Be With The Boys.” “Heart of Stone.” And some album titled Flowers I couldn't call to mind.
Me & the old man agreed on Miller, & that the Stones were great all the way up until the end of Goat’s Head Soup. We even agreed that the alternate version of the album’s opener “Dancing With Mr. D,” the one with Mick Taylor’s lead guitar solo, was better than the one on the official album, but it was stupidly kept off the official LP because Richards (though he wouldn’t admit it) had a problem with Taylor and couldn't countenance someone playing a better guitar solo than him. His best guitar solo was already 3 albums behind him “Gimme Shelter."
Sure, the Glimmer Twins writing partnership was dissolving a little, due to Keith Richards worsening heroin addiction, but he was still cogent enough to know that if he kept missing out on classic Stones tunes, he'd be gone like Brian Jones.
Keith was already missing out on key Stone's songs (“I Just Want To See His Face” AND “Shine A Light” had been done by skeleton crew versions of the Stones, & fans love those songs.) As hard as he’d tried to convince both the band and the fans that he was okay by singing lead vocal on “Happy,” from Exile, neither believed him. Everyone knew Keith was fucked up.
His rivalry with Mick Taylor was as its zenith, so much so that he insisted the superior version with Taylor on lead guitar be replaced with the swampy take, the slower version of “Dancing with Mr. D.”
“Winter,” me and the old man both agreed, was a cool song, an an indication of where the Stones might have gone without Richards. Less married to the verse-chorus-verse structure and more about drifting atmospherics.
After that, they were merely good until the last notes rang out on Tattoo You. They have not made a good album since. I’m 35.5 Tattoo You came out four years before I was born. The Stones have sucked for forty years! That’s longer than The Simpsons has sucked, with it’s mere 22 year record.
Me and that old man from Rainy River both “dug” (his word, not mine) the Stones’ super-danceable 1985 cover of “Harlem Shuffle,” but it’s not their song. I mean, they didn’t write it, which diminishes it somehow, in my eyes and the eyes of my Rainy River companion,
I like “Love Is Strong,” probably Mick’s best harmonica moment. And their last great song, “Anybody Seen My Baby?” (the one with Angelina Jolie in the video), the one that accidentally borrows the melody of K.D. Lang’s “Constant Craving.” You can check ‘em if you want. The Stones were right to give Lang a credit.
The similarity is uncanny. It was one of the Stones’ members daughters who warned them to give Lang a co-credit. She was right to say so. The chorus vocal melody is identical.
So I knew the Stones had a softer side….ballads, “I Got The Blues,” and that Satanic Majesties Request debacle when they tried best Sgt Pepper and failed spectacularly.
But a whole album called Flowers? How’d I miss that one?
“Oh it’s there,” the old man assured me.
“Huh.” He stuck me both as a teller of truth and a man who would not purchase bootlegs.
“Flowers,” he said. “Other people like other Stones albums, but I like Flowers. It’s my favourite.”
We established Flowers as his favourite and mine as “I dunno,” then we didn’t speak for a while. Finally I told him I was headed for Manitoba. He shot me an odd look. “What’re you gonna do there?” As if nothing ever happened in Manitoba.
“Nothin’,” I admitted. “Gonna keep goin’, hitting all points West til Calgary, then I'll hang there for a while with my sister, and then keep going West til I fall into the Pacific.”
“Huh,” he took a slug of beer. “Never been eh? It’s a lot colder than you’d expect.”ed
He chuckled then, one of those old man chuckles that lapses into a coughing fit and you don’t know whether to pat him on the back or surreptitiously dial 9-11. “Never seen the Pacific, ha! Never seen Manitoba, s’what I meant.”
I put my beer down and gaped at him.
He stared back, giving me nothing else. Any more info might lead to a possible reason and mitigate the oddness of of his never having been there. He knew the bomb had already been dropped. No cherry needed on top. He’d shocked me and he knew it.
“You live an hour from the border and you’ve never been to Manitoba?”
“That’s right.”
“Why?”
“Why?” He wiped beer suds off his chin and looked at me. “Since when did you take a special interest in Mantioban tourism?”
“Well…I don’t have ant particular…”
“You don’t give a shit,” he said, finishing my sentence for me.
“Remember just a moment ago when I asked you why you was goin to Manitoba?”
I nodded.
“And you said you was goin’ straight through. Now that’s not really goin’ to Manitoba, is it? It’s going through Manitoba. But those two things aren’t the same. All you’ll notice in Manitoba is the Trans-Canada splitting up.”
“Splittin up?”
“That’s right. After a few too many head-on collisions they separated the eastbound lanes from the westbound lanes. In some parts it’s just a single lane. You’ll notice that too. It only goes back to two lanes for Winnipeg, then Portage La Prairie, then Brandon.”
”How do you know all this if you’ve never…” I made a vague gesture suggesting vehicular movement.
“I got a lotta trucker friends. I know Regina’s the capital of Saskatchewan, but I couldn’t tell ya if Swift Current comes before Moose Jaw, or vice versa. I do know, however, and don’t ask me how, that Medicine Hat’s the first bigger city you’ll hit once you cross into Alberta. After that it’s only 2 or 3 hours to Calgary, then another to Canmore, then a half hour to Banff. After that…you’re on your own. But it’s called the Trans-Canada Highway for that reason,” he chuckled into a cough and this time I almost dud clap his back but he lifted his hand and shook his head no. “It transports you from one end of Canada to the other.”
I must’ve still looked shocked or confused about the Manbitoba thing. I always thought that if there was a line close enough, one should cross it.
“Sounds to me like if you could somehow leapfrog Manitoba and end up in Saskatchewan or Alberta, shave a few days off your trip and give yerself a break from luggin that thing around,” he nodded at my guitar. “You’d be pretty happy about it.”
There was no better time to ask then now, so I asked him if his was a proud Ontarian.
He looked @ me like he’d just walked in on me engaged in sexual congress with a goat.
“I’m proud to be from the north, not the south,” he spat out the latter word is disgust. Okay, so Toronto & Ottawa has a hockey rivalry. Everyone in Canada who isn’t from or currently residing in Ontario hates the province.
I don’t though. Like I said, I am deeply ambivalent.
I spoke to the Flowers man in May 2007. I then arrived in Calgary a day or two later & immediately grabbed my sister laptop to send out resumes to companies in different industries. Warehouse. Grocery Rail.
I had applied to about 60 companies, mostly shipping and receiving, retail, and a few construction jobs despite the fat that I din’t have tools steel-toe boots. Then the phone rang and I had a job starting tomorrow. (It snowed my first day).
Craigslist used to be so great. What happened?
It was once so monolithic people accused it of being “the Wal-Mart of smalltown newspaper classified sections. This politician, who name I forget, amd pronoun to., she/here/there or us
Oh for those halcyon days of free Craigslist, why hasn’t someone tried to replace it?! I know this sounds crazily entitled but after 4 years of advertising my services for free, all of sudden they want $5 every six weeks, which I can easily afford, I’m just wondering what changed, man, to make the website the biggest and most free online job posting boards
While I’m not so gullible to think each frame of Craigslist Joe, a man who embarks on an experiment in which he will not spend money for a month and relying on on the kindness of strangers for places to crash. It’s fake though. Telling someone “Hi, I am filming a documentary about a guy trying to live off nothing but the kindness of strangers for a whole month” is not the same as approaching a stranger on the sidewalk and asking if you can sleep on their couch. They’d have no reason to say yes, just as the old man in Rainy River “never had no reason to go to Manitoba.
So’s I never went. The best reason to not do something is to not have a reason to do it. It’s all the same when you’re up here at this part of the treeline. Subarctic. Ain’t nothin but jack pine. I don’t need to drive an hour to see what I can see out my backyard.”
He was getting down off the barstool now, it was taking him a long time but I could tell he was the kind of old man who put his dignity at a premium. Offering to help him get off that stool would have been worse than asking him if he wanted to step outside and trade punches.”
“Flowers,” he said, patting my shoulder on his way out. “I wish you nuthin’ but luck in all your travels.”
Flowers, I thought to myself.
Huh. I believed him. About everything. That he’d never laid eyes on Manitoba. That Flowers exists. That it was his favourite. Everything he’d said to me was true. Flowers is the one with “Ruby Tuesday” on it.”
IV: The pridestakes: State v Provincial
I don’t know if you’ve spent a lot of time in the United States, but the people down there are fucking obsessed with
1. Where they came from &
2. Where they’ve been
They are always slightly less concerned with where they are presently, but that’s the human condition. The present is a disappointment. Those of us who live in the present & often take stock of it usually range anywhere from bitter to mildly unimpressed. But what I mean to say is, if you talk to an American (and America is smaller than Canada, and is split into smaller section, so many Americans have lived in at least two states) they’ll tell you what state they were born in, say Colorado, what state they grew up in, say Nevada, and the state in which they presently exist, which ranges anywhere from bitter to mildly unimpressed in Virginia. Or Vermont. Or California. Or Idaho.
Try it yourself. Talk to an American sometime. I know one named Jenny, who I like a lot actually, who informed me that I was “one of the only Canadians she’d ever met who pronounced Massachusetts correctly. (It didn’t seem all that difficult to me, it’s pretty much phonetic: MASS-UH-CHEW-SITS. I could see a Canadian getting Connecticut wrong by saying “CONNECT-A-KIT” (the second “C” is silent, so the state is said CUH-NET-UH-KIT).
I just watched that Netflix documentary Malice at the Palace. Two minutes in & you’ve got a whole bunch of former Indiana Pacers, from Metta World Peace or whatever he calls himself now to Reggie Miller telling you just how insanely devoted to basketball the average Hoosier is. (I don’t know why people from Indiana call themselves Hoosiers, but they do).
So Americans have intense State pride.
They have intense municipal pride. When author Chuck Palahniuk read his short story “Guts” aloud in some New York City bookstore and noticed the vacant faces afterward, he commented that someone fainted in the last city he read that story in.
Somewhere, from the back of the room, came a flat-voweled rebuttal: “This is New York.”
Neighbourhood pride. “Jenny From The Block” (and The Bronx).
Street pride. The E Street Band. The Mayor of MacDougal Street.
Canadians have Municipal pride too. Undoubtedly. Especially in Toronto & Montreal. Hell, Arcade Fire’s debut is slathered in Neighbourhood’s, but then again, the two main dudes in the band, the Butler bros, are actually from Dallas & just pretended to be Canadian to ride a wave of international hype regarding Montreal’s music scene to the top.
Sigh.
Americans are fuckin’ Imperialists even when it comes to indie rock.1 One other thing about Arcade Fire…I think they need some new lyrical inspiration, what with the debut record having a bunch of Neighbourhoods
IV: WHAT IF? (ONTARIO EDITION)
Provincial pride.
Hard to give a fuck about a randomly drawn line.
Can you call to mind the Ontario flag? Can you see it in your mind’s eye or would you have to look it up?
You’re not engaged enough in this. Fine.
Then let’s play WHAT IF? (ONTARIO EDITION).
What if somebody (or somebodies) abducted you in the middle of the night, threw you in the back of a van (one with a mattress though, I wouldn’t want you severely uncomfortable in this theoretical situation), and then drove you, a highly proud or highly ambivalent Ontarioan (Ontarioite? Ontariarian) to the Manitoba or Quebec border, tossed you outta the van, handed you $12 000 and said:
“You are banned from Ontario for the rest of your natural life.”
“You go can wherever you want, anywhere in the world, except for anywhere in Ontario for the rest of your life. You can never come back.”
Then the van drives off.
How would you feel? Would exile make you like Ontario more? Or would you just miss your life, the bubble, the route to work, the little mini Sim City that was your existence, ands that seemed to have nothing whatsoever to do with the vast subarctic region of pine trees stretching thousands of kilometres northwards, farther than you can even travel. The road (Ontario Highway 599) literally ends at Pickle Lake, which is about 6 hours north of Thunder Bay. Look at where Pickle Lake is on the map.
So that’s the last town in Ontario…and there’s still hundreds of kilometres between downtown Pickle Lake - which, as you can see from this photograph, is positively bustling with three people - and James Bay, which is the southern bay of the larger body of water, Hudson Bay.
So. A life in Manitoba or Quebec. Or anywhere else. Or try to sneak home.
WHAT WOULD YOU DO?
Oh, btw…here’s me and my friends @ the Manitoba border in 2006:
And here’s me @ Lake Superior in 2003:
Anyway, what would you do?
As for me….I’d probably start afresh somewhere else and never come back.
V: SPEAKING OF EXILE…R.I.P. DENIS JOHNSON. A SAINT OF MODERN AMERICAN WRITING
1. Write naked. That means to write what you would never say.
2. Write in blood. As ink is so precious you can’t waste it.2
3. Write in exile, as if you are never going to back home, and you have to call back every detail.
Note the American spelling of “Neighborhood.” Fucking Butler Brothers.
Modern equivalent I guess would be trying to finish a section of prose, a sort story, or a poem on your phone when it’s 1%.