Saying Goodbye

Number One

The Never-Ending Farewell Tour

Always got a kick out of geriatric rock bands going on the road to give their fans one last memory to hold onto. Then there’s another tour and another, and we have a franchise going.

I like the idea. So I’m going to copy it. Whenever I reach 20,000 words or so I’m going to publish here at Kindle. It will stop when I die. Handles a problem I’ve been having with my wife. She feels very strongly that I should stop writing altogether because it works me up and in her view I’ve already said everything that needed to be said to our decadent nation over the past 50 years of my writings. She thinks writing will be the death of me. Whereas I know that writing is the life of me. For me writing is like breathing. I do it because I can’t not do it. Which, by the way, has always been my measure of the difference between talent and accomplishment. Lots of talented wordsmiths out there. But if they can be deterred, disappointed, intimidated into the incredibly easy act of not writing, they aren’t writers.

All those unwritten short stories, novels, poems, fantastical epic tales the young ones dream of do exist in some realm, just nor ours.

By now I know quite a lot about writing. Should anybody care? No. But I do. I still want to imprint myself on you. This particular project is a golden opportunity. I don’t need to invent a context. It’s already here. I’m an old man who forgot to write about a lot of stuff along the way, and now I can do it for free, unless I amuse you enough to buy my stuff.

Stuff. It’s all stuff, you know. I’m a guy who has tried on a multitude of writer voices, from Cynewulf to Shakespeare to Blake to… skip skip skip… Waugh, Cheever, Mailer, Wolfe, and Barthelme. It’s all fiction, a line by line, paragraph by paragraph exercise in making stuff up in the form of words in order to communicate a particular perspective on reality as the writer believes it to be.

Good argument for laying down the pen for good? No. Historically, most writers retreat into silence or hatred of mankind at the end. Mark Twain’s Hadleyburg is a popular destination.

I have had a related but different experience. I know we are headed for a Dark Age, but I also believe in the extraordinary creature called Man, who persists through many ages of ordeal and privation, only to emerge stronger and more brilliantly creative after all the necessary lessons have been relearned.

Why would you attend any of my farewell concerts? I invented a religion. A pretty perfect one that fits the facts. I had a community of punk writers who didn’t believe anything they’d been told or preached at about. So I gave them a magical black man who reinterpreted Egyptian mythology in more modern terms. Akhenaton became ‘Kanatos,’ the first individual, who described the ‘ka’, not the way commonly conceived as the double of a person in the spiritual realm, but as something infinitely greater. The Ka was the birth of human consciousness, the means by which words came to mean more than physical descriptions (helmets, weapons, tattoos) and took on esoteric connotations. One word starts physical, becomes more, and the human mind is born. I said a religion. Another Trinity. The Alba, the Raptor, and the Raven. Alba is the unity of everything, personified as Iris. The Raven is the end of consciousness, a blissful state of unawareness the punks had already learned was far from blissful. The Raptor was the warrior in between Iris and Raven. The one who intervened when the issue was in doubt. The punks named their own Raptor persona “Doctor Dream.” Who did in fact make an appearance in the greatest work of the punk writing movement, a prose poem called ‘Epiphany Ship.’

But that was written many years ago. Why should you read the next of the 20,000 words? There was once a writer named Malcolm Boyd. He wrote a masterpiece about drinking. He was so eloquent that drinkers were warned not to read the book because they would go back to drinking. He died before he could write another book. For a long time I thought I should have died after I published a book called “The Boomer Bible.” But I didn’t. I wasn’t destined for fame or wealth. I had a debt to repay, I had been given that book, especially in the critical final phase I had written the whole book to make possible. A 10-year act of faith. I accomplished the final absolutely necessary step in six weeks, guided by dreams all night long that brought the whole project home.

I was wearing an Ohio State sweatshirt at the time. I’m wearing one now.

See? Everyone who knows anything about R. F. Laird knows he graduated from Harvard at 19 years of age. But there’s also the Ohio half of me. Which, believe it or not, is my salvation.

Why you should keep reading…