Letter to Susan Thoms

"Everybody's gotta be somewhere!"

To Susan Thoms

Jul 12 at 10:32 PM

Thanks for the mail packet! It arrived here in 10 days. That's about the same delivery time as using our Miami address, but Miami costs you less postage. We pay for the forwarding.

Wish I could have seen/heard the opera described in the libretto. The woman who got moved from the homeless site sure has a good outlook on life. Sorry your neighborhood is having drive-by shootings. Hope that's an aberration. Who is Stella Marrs? She looks familiar, if that's her on the card; or is she a lesbian musician from Washington State? I know Stella Maris was an Italian Line ship that collided with a Swedish ship and went down in the Atlantic. No, that was the Andrea Doria. Who was she? And Stella was a character in Streetcar Named Desire. Oh wait! Her last name was Kowalski; is that Polish for Sea? 

My mind races around a lot lately. I compose paragraphs and pages for my novel in my head all day and night and read Virginia Woolf for style tips and think: I have already lived twice as long as Marcel Proust and he wrote six volumes covering 30 years of his life in about 10 years so if I am beginning now I need 20 years to cover my life which I think has been a lot more interesting than Proust's; but maybe Proust was a more interesting writer although who am I to judge and nobody else of literary judgment has ever read anything by me; who. by the way, has changed my pen name to Keith Burton Cline, since I discovered that there is a multitude of Keith Clines you can find on Google and I have finally opened a Twitter account insisting that my name is Keith Burton Cline and there is only one Keith Burton Cline who is me and anybody else you may meet with that name is the imposter, and not the real me! How's that for a Proustian run-on sentence? I am ordering a book by Karl Ove Knausgaard who is being called the Norwegian Proust because he has written six volumes of run-on sentences without paragraphs covering the minutia of his life from boyhood to ... he's only 46 for god's sake ... how could he have anything to say so young? He writes in Norwegian and 80% of Norwegians (what's that, about 1000 people?) have read all his work so far and it's all available in English now and since I want to be the American Karl Ove Knausgaard I had better get crackin'.

I know you are reading this on a teeny tiny Viagra telephone screen so I hope you are not going cross eyed. I am just fucking around with you. Sorry! Now that I have decided to use the computer and email again I am all manic as hell. Mania is lots more fun than depression, but it is harder to manage. It's like standing under a waterfall of ideas. Just try to catch one drop!

Love, Keith