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[Pt. 15 of an ongoing text...]

I’m not willing to work hard. That’s something I’ve learned about myself. If a deed doesn’t come easy, I’d rather leave it undone. I like deeds that accomplish themselves. That’s why I’m so enamored with the notion of a reader-written book. It’s almost like I’m saying: Just create something genius, and let me sit here on this throne and receive all the credit. (You can cut the phrase “It’s almost like” from that last sentence.)

For instance, I “own” this ugly house where I currently live (I don’t really have a mansion or a castle: those are just make-believe properties that I reference to cheer myself up and keep my mind off my actual situation) — I’m talking seriously about my own real life now: I’m trying to stray from the novel at hand, so that it can rest in peace. — And this house needs a lot of work… 

Let’s focus only on the most visible aspects of my true home’s east (front) view: the house is long overdue to have its siding replaced, all the windows are dusty and cracked, plus it needs a new front door… 

Now, to save money (because, in reality, I have no money), I should do all of this repair work myself (as opposed to hiring expensive handywomen), but I don’t want to do anything other than sleep all day.

So I wish that someone else would come fix up my house and live my life for me. I would willingly pay for anyone else to act the role of Bryan Ray, if he or she will accept the fake money that I just printed. It looks pretty good: there’s a picture of me on the front of every bill, and I have suds in my hair.

Gosh, what if there existed a species of human who loves replacing windows and installing siding and doors as much as I love writing bad books! Then, the members of this species would appear before me and offer to do all my house-repair projects for free, out of sheer love of the work — exactly the same way that I myself appear before potential readers unsolicited and force upon them these literary masterpieces. (These are texts that you can’t live without.)

However, yet again returning to face the awful truth, I clearly have a desire for my house repairs to get done, whereas nobody has a desire for me to write books. Therefore, when I offer to compose text for free, it’s more of a threat than a gift. I’m like that character from the film Out 1 (1971) who wanders from table to table in a café, standing before those who are dining, holding his harmonica up as if he might play it, and the customers give him money to abstain from playing. — If my country would offer me a living wage, I’d gladly stop writing.

My yard also has overgrown trees and bad, patchy grass, which I wish that someone else would voluntarily take care of.

The neighbor directly across the street from us is a nice guy — I’ve met him a couple times, and we’ve talked for a bit. His house is situated so that it faces mine directly: it’s like our two houses are looking in a mirror at each other; and they’re both ranch-style places, so they’re pretty much the same size and shape; but his house is presentable and mine is an eyesore. He’s always doing work to fix up his place; last weekend he even cut out a section of its foundation and added a small window near ground-level, probably to get more light in his basement, which he and his buddies are remodeling. (He works as a contractor and does general construction — carpentry, plumbing, etc. — so he knows a lot of guys who can come and help him when he tackles home-repair projects.) I’m jealous of all this progress he’s making, and it makes me feel like a slob that I’m doing nothing to improve my own abode’s appearance. 

It’s weird to care so little about tangible reality, while caring so much about the dreamy world of literature. I’ve finished a lot of books, because nobody was willing to put up enough cash to stop me; but full decades of finished text-work takes up only a small space upon a bookshelf. — If my house-building neighbor worked as much as I did over the last decade, there would be skyscrapers here on earth, everywhere that you look. So that’s one difference between doing mental things versus physical things.

I also hate mowing my lawn.

But all this book-talk makes me want to review my own underachievements. So humor me while I pull my accumulated life-work out of its chest and hold it up and soliloquize about it like it’s the head of that chimp-clown who taught me the proper way to laugh: 

First I wrote those five scrolls that ended up becoming my personal Bible — The Birth of Satan; Save the Lord; Perchance to Sleep No More; The Teller Chases Her Tale; and Aha! — What do I think of this collection, now that some years have passed? I think it was mostly a waste of energy; but I also don’t see how I could’ve gotten on to the superior texts that followed if I hadn’t slain the dragon of my inherited religion (which is what this labor did for me). So I try not to be too down on myself for that indiscretion. 

Next I have my two volumes of “Self-Amusements”: I put the book-length compositions in the first volume and the collections of shorter texts in the second. I’m proud of these writings: I still think of them as the peak of my failed efforts. (I’m not trying to be mopey or self-deprecatory by calling my works failures — I’m just being accurate: these texts have failed, no matter what metric or standard of judgment you use to assess them. And I love them very dearly.) I was so proud of these enigmatic texts, in fact, that I truly did intend to “retire from writing” after I finished them…

But I knew that I still enjoyed indulging in daily scribbling, so I began to keep a diary from that point forward — it was an unfunny joke to call it a private diary whose every entry I would share publicly. My only plan was to continue adding to this thing, which I kept publishing online, entry after entry; and my only rule for myself was that I’d post not more than a single entry per day. I assumed that I would continue this habit until death, so that the last entry would be the one that I wrote before I croaked. (“Croak” is a derogatory North American slang term meaning to “die”, as in the rumor: “Bryan Ray finally croaked in the year 2020”.) But then the pandemic happened, and I came to my senses and realized that it would be foolish for me to entrust my Public Private Diary to the hands of the Internet. Therefore I quickly overworked to transfer the thing into codex form, so that it would at least be preserved on physical paper. (Physical paper has the advantage of being burnable.) And I was shocked to find how many volumes were required to archive the text that had accumulated. There were fourteen volumes. (Fourteen is the number that symbolizes infinity.) 

So, seeing how easy it was to fill up so many books, I got the bright idea to switch over from straightforward confessional writing to making a few fake novels; cuz I hadn’t yet tried affronting the novel genre. So I began with Detective Bryan. My reasoning was as follows: A novel requires its author to center upon at least one protagonist and to adhere vaguely to a theme. Now, I knew that any character I chose to be my protagonist would bore me unless I made my own self the hero; so that explains the “Bryan” part of the title; and for my theme I chose detective work, because there’s nothing I enjoy more than snooping around, spying on people and making false judgments. 

Then this novel led to a string of other novels, which I wrote extremely rapidly, one after the next — they’re almost like one single big bad book — after Detective Bryan came the novel Cruisin for a Bruisin with the Giant Squid; and then Merry Christmas from Bryan Ray; Quantity over Quality; Astro Bryan; Vampyre Bryan; and finally Bryan the Tyger. 

Actually, the last of the above series is this present self-abortion. Or it sorta half-is. It’s like a tardy coda that came only after it was needed, and then broke anyway. Yes, I wanna think of this current composition as my transition out of the novel format and back into comfortable nothingness. Of course I still will keep writing, as long as the God that I hate inflicts me with breath, but I just want everything I say to be nothing again.