It’s 5:16 on a Tuesday afternoon. The day is starting to cool and I am sitting on my couch without shoes on and I am Youtubing Cure songs as I type this. I’ve written a bunch of words today. I discovered a structural flaw in the novella I’ve been trying to write, which means there’s a bunch of rewrites on the way. When I’m done with this, I’ll be heading off to write a bunch more words. But for the moment I’m sitting here, on the internet, thinking about the scene from Rob Epstein and Jeffery Friedman’s Howl where Allan-Gisberg-by-way-of-James-Franco says: In San Fansisco I had a year of psychotherapy with Doctor Hicks. I was blocked. I couldn’t write. I was still trying to act normal. I was afraid I was crazy. I was sure that I was supposed to be heterosexual and something was wrong with me. And Doctor Hicks kept saying, “what do you want to do? What is your hearts desire?” And finally, I said, “well, what I’d really like to do is just quit all this. Get a small room with Peter, devote myself to writing, contemplation, and fucking. Smoking pot and doing whatever I want. And he said,

’m sufficiently old that I feel like the window for talking about We Are Lady Parts is over, what with the series coming out in May of 2021 and our engagement with it taking place in early September. I’m old because I’m trapped in a cultural paradigm where immediacy is a primary virtue when recommending narratives—the same paradigm where books have a shelf-life of three to four weeks, television shows get consumed in scheduled blocks and paid for by advertising, and films exist to be shown on the big screen or pulled off the limited shelf-space of your local blockbuster. Talk about a film, a book, or a television show four months down the line in that kind of environment, and the moment is already over. You wait for re-runs or the DVD release that might never happen, scour second-hand bookstores or badger your library to order in a copy. But this is the streaming age; the binge watch age; the ebook age. Online stores don’t have the limitations of physical shelf space, and they’re free to stock vast back lists if you’re eager to engage. A penchant for addressing things while they’re new is an atavism of an earlier

Every now and then I write something that gets linked to a whole bunch and a whole bunch of people hit the site for the first time. Most of them read, nod, and move on about their day. Some of them… Well, they object to the profanity. Some even go so far as to email me about it. I understand this, to a certain extent. I know a lot of people who object to profanity – my mother is definitely not a fan – but I’m a much bigger fan of using it for emphasis. More importantly, I’m a fan of using it here on the blog because all those shits, fucks, goddamns, and mother-fuckers do two very important things. SWEARING FILTERS THE AUDIENCE Less than 1% of the blog posts people respond to tend to be actually profanity, and even then it largely depends on your stance on words like goddamn and screwed. It’s not a lot by reasonable standards, but they stand out because certain words are less polite than others. That’s as it should be. That’s why I use them. Think of those words as a shark’s fin, cutting through the surf, warning you that danger is on