During the first bookend of summer, Nonfiction and I decided to “take a break.” She and I just couldn’t communicate, I was sick of hearing her sigh in that emphatic, yet passive-aggressive way that suggests I’m the problem, and that I need to figure it out. She was sick of hearing about bodily fluids and ex-girlfriends and long-winded straight narratives about getting mugged in Chile. In light of this, Fiction and I started hooking up. We spent a badass summer together, dry humping like teenagers behind lawn chairs at an outdoor Poison concert. This one time, as a joke, we fed expired cat food to a college geography prof every morning at 9:00 A.M., while we enlisted a poetry prof read to him poems about geography’s pedagogical decline during his meals. Ooh, another time, we fucked my friend’s girlfriend in a moonlit park while frat dudes high-fived and tossed glow in the dark Frisbees to one another. Essentially, we wrestled a giant squid to death and used his ink to blind my demons (or whatever cutesy, idealistic, “Ooh, I have all summer to write! I’m gonna write 5 theses in every genre!” images I deployed in the blog I wrote on this subject three or so months ago). Well, the fun’s over – it’s time go back to Nonfiction.

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I’m busy figuring out how in the fuck to use Twitter and trying to get my voice back for fall quarter after reading so much Anthony Powell the last few months (I can be a bit of an imitator, and believe me – brandishing wordy, pseudo-British-Twentieth-Century elevated language in an essay/memoir in which one huffs nail polish remover preceding a three-way at 10:30 in the morning on Labor Day just doesn’t work), so I’ll leave you with Glen David Gold and Alice Sebold talking about fear of success in writing, a topic that seems to have popped up in one capacity or other over the weekend on Bark. I’ll be back in a week, quite possibly on the topic of regaining your voice after reading one so drastically different from your own, though I’ll try to think of something cooler, like this. Rock the Casbah, y’all.