John S. Hall
American poet, author, singer, and lawyer perhaps best known for his work with King Missile, an avant-garde band that he co-founded in 1986 and has since led in various disparate incarnations.
I am so far away from being the person I want to be. I am a terrible person and I am overwhelmed with guilt. I am paralyzed with shame and fear. If I work hard at improving myself each day, I may get a little tiny bit better, but I won't get much better—I'll never be great. It's too late for me. I've really blown it.
I was a teenage wuss. In junior high school, I had oily, stringy hair and lots of pimples. I wore really wussy clothes. Most of the kids called me a faggot. Even some of the other wusses called me a faggot. There was maybe five kids in the whole school who were wussier than I was. I was really wussed out. I was afraid of girls, and guys scared the shit out of me.
Ed walked away from the program feeling fortified and stapled. His brain was buzzing, the way it always did just after Jeopardy! He loaded up the microbus with Atlases and poseidons and headed for Pope County. "I've had it," he sang. "I've had it with puns, alliteration, Russian literature, Italian neorealism, meaningless cross-references, and laundry lists of nonsense. I shall drive without a license, without clothing, without direction, and if I make it to Arkansas, fine, and if I'm running late, if I'm running a numbers game, it doesn't matter, I shall keep on running. Yes, this is the answer. This is the ending. I shall keep on running, because a body in motion tends to stay emotional, and it's better to feel. Pain is better than emptiness, emptiness is better than nothing, and nothing is better than this."
Today, I should think of something about myself that really annoys me, and I should try to change it. Then, when I fail to change it, I can be annoyed by that as well. Then, I can be annoyed about how easily I get annoyed. Then I can get angry.
[M]y father was a really great man. I'll never forget the last thing he ever said to me. Nor will I ever repeat it.
It is better to curse the darkness than to light a candle, because, first of all, how much light is one candle going to shed anyway? And secondly, what is there to see that is so important? Whereas cursing is always satisfying. The next time I find myself in the dark, I will curse heartily.
I think it's time we so-called "sensitive men" stopped kidding ourselves with all this crap about how guys in the Marines and garage mechanics and just generally, you know, macho guys—about how they're insecure about their masculinity because they have little dicks, because that's crap, and we know it. Guys in the military, construction workers, football players, they all have bigger dicks than you and I, and we might as well just accept it. Because it's stupid and dishonest for us to go around implying that us literary, intellectual, politically aware, feminist-type men are actually more confident than the insensitive, sexist, brute-type men because size doesn't matter, and even if it did, we have the bigger dicks, because this is bullshit. I think it's high time we all took a good hard look at our dicks and faced the music.
If most of us were wind up-toys, could we trust the few of us that weren't to wind us up when necessary? I think not. We would be a separate oppressed minority. Even if we were in the majority, it would still be that way. The ones that weren't wind-up toys would have the upper hand, and we would have to look out for each other, because they wouldn't.
When the [Mystical Shit] CD first started to take shape, I was very unsure about what was happening—I wasn't sure I liked what these guys were coming up with. I missed Dogbowl's melodies, and I didn't like that it was loud. But other people seemed to like it a lot, and at that time, that was important to me, so I went with it. As time went by, I started to appreciate the oddity of me in a rock band. Unfortunately, I didn't really embrace the idea fully until that band had broken up. Nowadays, I can look back and think it was fun and funny that I was in a rock band, but at the time, it bothered me a lot and I complained about it all the time, but I lacked the moral character to do anything about it.
I have tried very hard to find meaning in what I do, but I have found instead a vast and limitless nothingness. I tried to embrace the nothingness, but it slipped through my grasp, and now there is nothing where the nothingness was. This may sound meaningful, but it isn't.
It is extremely unlikely that I will ever be one of the richest people in the world. Almost all rich people were born rich, and almost all of them marry other rich people, and almost all of them hold onto almost all of their money, to pass on to their kids. Money doesn't appear out of nowhere—the more they have, the less for me. Life is a "zero sum game," and I am the zero.
When I'm feeling proud of myself, I should remember to ask myself why I think I am of any value at all. I have done nothing that a hundred thousand other people couldn't do, and most of them would probably do it better, and they probably wouldn't feel so self-important about it. I should always be ashamed of myself.
Sometimes if you go to see a very, very, happy movie, a Hollywood movie, you can walk out of the movie and feel very depressed because it's so false. And other times you see a very depressing movie and it makes you feel good, happy because you've seen something real. You've seen something that talks to you and says that your bad feelings are legitimate. And then you can go further with that and say, "Well, this bad feeling is good, and this good feeling is bad, but is it good to feel bad and is it bad to feel good?" I'm concerned with feelings. And sometimes when I feel good, I'll write something very negative because I have the strength to do it. But when I really, really feel very bad, what I want to do is make myself feel better, so I'll write something happier.
It seems, in theory, that I should be able to control at least a few of my bad habits. The problem is that my habits make me depressed, and the depression makes me want to indulge my habits and so I do. There isn't any solution to this.
The fact that many people overindulge, and lose themselves in excess, and make fools of themselves and act like idiots, is no reason for me to do these things. The reason for me to do these things is that I, too, am an idiot.
Today, life will offer me many lessons. I will learn nothing.
Perhaps I will achieve a small success today. If so, I must not be taken in. I am not on a roll, I am not in the zone. It was an accident, a happenstance. Such things are bound to happen sometimes. The false feeling of confidence will soon pass.
Many people talk as if they have all the answers, whereas I know I don't. That's probably why no one listens to me.
...I wanna know about the commercial I saw on TV: An Irish guy walking through a field of green, whistling one of those Irish jigs, and a woman walks up and says, "Manly, yes, but I like it too." Then the guy pulls out a huge knife and cuts off his first two fingers and somehow catches them in what's left of his left hand and hands them to the woman. Did I mention they're both dressed in green? They they both sing this song together: "Are ya icky? Are ya sticky? Are ya hot as anything? Hey! Cut off two of your fingers, and stab yourself in the eye!" Then he stabs himself in the eye and hands her the knife, and she stabs herself in the eye, okay? Okay? So what about that?
I am a sensitive artist. Nobody understands me because I am so deep. In my work, I make allusions to books that nobody else has read, music that nobody else has heard, and art that nobody else has seen. I can't help it, because I am so much more intelligent and well-rounded than everyone who surrounds me.