In the fecundity of youth, when we still had passions, wouldn’t it have been a pretty thing to create a spectacle that lasted longer than ourselves? Some people try by creating a life, giving it a name and letting that thing wander off on its own. Such is the zenith of man and woman: a life created and loosed upon this world we all had a hand in spinning.

There are other ways; there are the arts, there are the mechanics, there are the virtues. I have struggled in my pursuit of creation, and what’s more, I seem to suffer greatly by the same or similar sickness as most writers: I dislike my creations.

Certainly, writing is not some spoiled brat rolling around and dribbling along the rug, bolstered by the peasant notion that all life is good. Writing, for the most part I daresay, also requires some kind of parameters in as much as one must codify their utterances into a language, and then adhere to a modicum of grammar, unlike, say, painting, which allows among its hallowed ranks Malevich’s White on White, Baer’s Untitled, and quite literally anything by Jackson Pollock. In any case, I won’t try to defend the written word as some last bastion of reason - it’s not. In fact, it’s quite clear that books are replaced with screens, and prose replaced by whatever it is you call a ‘tweet’. In fact, reading itself is very much desired by the masses, but only ever in chewable pills of 280 characters in length. And we wonder why we elect the people we elect, or why the boogeymen of “capitalism”, “prejudice”, and “national security” linger just out of reach, striking at seemingly random intervals from the inky shadows.

I suppose one could pull back and objectively say that my writing, my creations, my children, are malformed things, hidden among the scraps of a filthy kennel dungeon, only allowed to peek through the barred windows of an inescapable basement. Sunlight may as well be a nuclear flash to these perverted things, and any attention garnered is wasted as a sort of masturbation among fettered limbs. My writing is so imperfect, so droll, that it pains me to have finished a piece at all because it means I’ve capped off any real potential. I often hear people say, “Well let me be the judge - you never let anyone read your work!” And that’s true, for good reason. Quite frankly, once you’ve locked away your mongoloid specimen in the cellar, no amount of convincing can change your mind that what you’re doing is wrong, and that someone should love the thing and wash upon it the sort of dignity it deserves. It’s a real horror show, then, because you, the parent, are quite certain you’re wrong in both respects: wrong for having created it, and wrong for locking it away until it starves. Yet, where are the millions of eager eyes begging to nourish your creation, begging to hold it, coddle it, worship it? There aren’t any. Few trouble themselves with the actual upkeep of such things, and far fewer are truly interested in giving it their time.

And so here I am, some clownish relic of an era passed. I’m watching my aging family finally peel off into death and I’m watching my years grow long in the tooth, too. Meanwhile, my muse seems to have skipped away somewhere, out among the other muses, and I can hear their echoes call up to me from a valley playground hidden forever.

I finished writing Regolith after nearly five years, and I don’t even care if it ever sees a pair of eyes. This, my child, may as well never have been born. I’m now moving my attention to a sort of “Volume II” of the Fawney Rig; not an extension or sequel, but something taking place in the same space and time. And yet I can barely muster five minutes for it.

If I were the Creator, and I had spent so many minutes and hours fashioning this beautiful Earth, and these wondrous cosmos, and if I finally fashioned a being like myself, but far less perfect, and I stood that golem up, and I breathed my soul into and said, “Live,” I, too, would stand back in awe of my work. But, like the Creator, I would watch the little thing moving around like a depraved animal, ignorant, murderous, imperfect, and I, too, would turn my back, shake my head, and sit among the heavens wondering what should be next.

And that’s assuming we weren’t already God’s sophomore project. His first masterpiece(s) probably ensure his shame for us.