This is a story about love.  Initially I was going to say This is a story about love more or less.  But I have decided that it is in fact a story about love.  These were the first three sentences to a novel I did not write that I called The Valkyrie.  As with many of the titles to novels I did not write there was a fucking brutish back and forth in my thinking about whether or not to leave the The in the title.  Valkyrie.  The Valkyrie.  In most cases I entirely shun using a The in a title tending to think (even in awkward cases) that the removal of the word makes everything so much the fuck better sounding.  In this particular case though I decided and felt entirely comfortable with the decision of leaving the word be.  An odd thing about the piece is that I often confuse when fucking and where I attempted to write it.  It was quite unwitting (and yet not) that so many of the incidental details of the bit of the fucker I did manage to write down came from actual buses I had ridden actual cocksucking parking garages I had walked through actual strips of shops strung together.  I sometimes think it particularly odd to think about the moment in it where the poor fucking guy (terrible colic plaguing him) tried to get a security guard to let him into a building the guard not even looking up at his insistent taps on the window.  Odd because I picture myself writing it when I was guard for that building and the movie theatre parking structure because it was the building I rather had in mind when I wrote the scene.  Not the way it fucking happened though.  Years and years (and it seems in the wrong direction) separate the one event and the other. I certainly without one question or hesitation would rather be the letter K than the letter L or even the letter F. Though I have no real objections to the letter F. Or to most letters in general.  I ride down the escalator and realize I did not hit the fucking button for a motherfucking bus transfer after getting off of the metro train at the station. And this is a good amount of difference in money.  Straggling newspapers on benches.  She is sneezing.  I am thinking about how often I will need to do this if really any specific sort of progress is to be made in the matter with her.  Her. Her.  Another woman.  Not her. The character in the novel worked a job (at the time of writing the novel it was principally important absolute fuck imperative that the character have employment that was an odd drudging mixture of fabulist idea and droning reality full of endless pointless detail and yet somehow fanciful enough to keep a sense of life to it) where he had to listen to the recordings of audio books to make cunting certain that what the reader read was actually the words as they appeared in the accompanying text.  He was very good at this and could manage to audit the tapes at high speed.  A side effect was that voices not his own would just pop into his thoughts here and there quoting snatches of prose or verse or equation (at the time I was not averse to using other actual writing so it would be Joyce or Dr. Seuss it would be Maple Hill Farm or it would be Feynmans’s lectures on physics it would be anything).  Walking home one day the guy is struck with a horrible colic pain in his abdomen and in the process of lurching home happens to see (this while hunched over in a bus waiting for the driver to finish a cigarette outside) a young woman and he is overcome with the feeling that he should do her some good turn.  In his state nothing comes to mind but in the five or ten minutes of pressing his forehead to the window glass (convincing himself that he is in no shape just then to do anything for anyone) he builds up a healthy little shit thing to obsess about.  The bus pulls off.  He decides it is good that he did not have a chance to engage the woman in conversation.  What would my good turn have been (I remember writing him thinking to himself) to lurch around her accosting? And the novel proceeds with the ins and outs of the young man’s life quite boring quite plodding a lot of him thinking to himself or having his thoughts invaded by books that are read into his ears at high speed all day.  By chance he happens to see the same girl he wanted to do a good turn leaving a convenience store enters the store once she has walked away and makes some inquiries after who she might be.  The nearest he gets is that she works at a frame store someplace nearby (or used to work there).  The young man decides that he is going to (for no reason with no intention behind it at all) purchase for her a dozen roses deliver them and that will be his good turn.  He manages to do this.  And fucking then the novel continues.  There is never a further moment of direct interaction between he and the young woman. He never tries to approach her in person (thinking he must have come across as awkward and vaguely menacing approaching her in the parking lot giving her the cuntfucking roses and just walking away) but he gets it in his head that no matter what ever single day he is going to see to it that she receives a dozen roses.  Every day.  Forever as far as he is concerned.  And it becomes just another tick tock of his day as the matter is simple enough.  Call up and have flowers delivered.  If ever (he reasons) there seems to be trouble (if she calls the delivery place and warns them she does not want flowers) he will use another company.  He figures that she will get the idea that he means no harm and more likely than not she will come to appreciate the daily thing expect it feel more worried if it stops than if its continues.  He in fact laments that he ever approached her in person. The novel was set up on my then sort of clockwork progression method.  It was to be nine sections I believe.  Each section a new tweak on the proposition.  The progression was everything.  There were not to be surprises or suspense there was not to be an idea that some particular outcome was more desirable than another.  A novel was like stating and then testing an equation.  Or it was like wrapping a rubber band around something wrapping it again again the thing getting tighter and tighter harder to manipulate finding how tightly it could be wrought before it might break.  I have it (due to some circumstance with his financial situation) come to be such that it is actually burdensome to get the flowers everyday.  One day he does not think he is going to be able to pull it off gets caught up in some business calls the bullshit delivery place too late has to find a way to track the woman down deciding it will count if he just tapes the flowers to the door of where she works (though he does not know if she is on duty there the next day) and so he ends up begging (practically on his knees) a stranger in a grocery store to purchase the flowers for him.  Another section would tweak it so that circumstances found him caught out without the flowers and so he attacks one of those vagrant flower sellers in the evening running off like mad with the take. He is struck by a car once and hospitalized a few days ghastly concerned when he is able to leave that he has not been able to make the delivery for almost a week and so buys an entire weeks worth to have delivered.  And so on and so on.  He is kept away for a day by the funeral of his mother and so before leaving the cemetery takes a dozen of the flowers from her grave and delivers them (by this point he only incidentally happens to know where the young woman lives) to the young woman’s mailbox. As the novel proceeded it was to become clear that the young woman was scarcely a person in the thoughts of the young man.  It became more of a quirk a fucking compulsion to deliver the flowers.  It became a focal point and began to become a noise something he thought of as pestering but found himself unable to do away with.  He never got particularly upset though. And it was not that he had no other life.  To the contrary.  The novel was to spend much much more time dealing with the minutia and the intricacies of the particulars of his work place and his apartment and casual nights out with friends and brief sexual affairs than it did with the flowers.  And this also was to be dealt with mathematically.  In effect the novel was to forget about the flowers in motherfucking perfect pace with them losing importance to the young man in perfect pace to the reader realizing they meant nothing.  In the first section no roses (obviously) just the idea.  And then a section where they were of primary importance thousands of words devoted to them.  And then less.  And then less. And the prose more perfunctory.  In the final section he learns that the woman has not for months (it was important that this did not go on for too long as it was not in keeping with the tone of reality I wanted a man delivering flowers every day for nine months would be fascinating a man delivering flowers every day for fifteen years or some shit would be cocksucking stupid) been living in the place where he has been sending the flowers.  And when he learns this that is to be the only mention in that section. The final one.  A kind of oblong symmetry. I don’t think that in particular the rain ever seems to sound like music though admittedly I have said that I think it does form time to time.  Today this fucking woman is wearing something straight out of the window display on the street I am walking down. And I think that my coat this one (this one the one I am wearing) has a stink to it like too many cigarettes. Fucking annoying because don’t I always just think this when it’s been a few days since I’ve even fucking smoked and not after one after the other after the other? The Valkyrie was to end with the rather poetic and out of nowhere sentence And the sky around him too rose like a valkyrie.  I was hesitant about this fucking sentence because it contained one of the words of the title and I normally found it insufferably shitty for a novel to have the phrase in its title anywhere in the prose.  Additionally calling the novel The Valkyrie and never having any reason given or mention of that word seemed the more aesthetic and interesting thing to do.  But the first sentences occurred to me with the last sentence built in so I fucking figured that as long as it was referenceless bizarre completely not in keeping with the blunted oddness of the rest of the pock marked prose everything would work out.  At times the idea for the novel would resurface. I think once I even tried to write some of it again picking up where I left off knowing well that for me for my mind this was beyond a fucking impossibility.  I once may have tried to convince myself to recycle just the first cunting section (called Colic) into a story of its own (as it was something like twelve thousand words long and I motherfucking adored it) but I knew that this would be lying.  And though all I ever managed to do every fucking moment of my actual life was to lie to fuck people over to despise myself and let any trash at all flow from my blood and eyes and lungs out through my teeth and tongue I would not let myself do something as simple as call a fucking section of an unwritten novel a story when I knew it just fucking was not. I am certain with this one that there was at some point a name a title that it was called something.  I have this same certainty for a lot of them.  It was my wont to always have a fucking title for something.  I would pride myself on my titles.  I was not Dylan. I could not come up with Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues Love Minus Zero Over No Limit It Takes A Lot To Laugh It Takes A Train To Cry.  No.  But there was something.  Something I must have jotted scrawled neatly penned umpteen times in notebooks on whatever scrap slips of paper were around at the particular job I worked on napkins. All of that.  I liked to write titles. Would have those lists of them try to keep them a litany in my head reminding myself of how many of the fucking things I was going to write. It was important to keep the fuckers named as the ones I did not name would always seem to get lost splintered into vagaries a handful of comments. The novel concerned a man who every day would go to a public park.  There a woman a human statue performed keeping the exact same pose for hours and hours the strolling crowds of people milling around.  She did not even alter her position every hour or so as remarks the central character (I do not recall if these people were named) some of the other human statues he had seen would often do.  The central character sets up an old fashioned camera. It stands on three legs. The sort of camera where he must duck under a cloth and hold up the flash bulb out to one side (only his bulb does not flash I remember though I cannot recall what the point of that was except that he thinks at one point that people watching him set up the camera waiting for the flash always look confused when he pulls himself out from under the cloth looks around stretching out his lower back).  He takes a picture of the lady statue.  Then he mills around the camera left there always within eye sight in case somebody runs off with it.  After an hour he takes another picture.  Then mills around.  Always he leaves about an hour before her shift is done (that is how he thinks of it) walks through the city for a few blocks camera tucked under his arm cigarette to lip always a funk and a cold mist in the city (I think) boards a bus rides it to where his apartment rooms are purchases cigarettes and small bottles of water and juice from a shop and goes up the stairs home.  There may have been in certain thoughts scenes of him going to his job in his apartment talking with friends and so forth.  All of those fucking things.  In the case of this novel though I believe I discarded those scenes.  I believe it was always set up the same. He comes to the park. He takes his pictures. He leaves. He walks to and rides the bus. He buys his little things and goes home. Every single time I go through my pockets I find another receipt which makes me realizes that what the fuck am I purchasing anyway?  Read it. Yes.  Fuck.  I remember that.  What was it that attendant had said?  They look at me friendly and I always get the feeling it would be the simplest matter on earth to become friends with them.  Car wash attendants are aloof and seem like dangerous motherfuckers.  On the other hand what was it I used to look for when looking into glasses from the dishwasher to be certain that they were actually clean?  I would drink milk from the container quickly and wipe my finger around the rim cap to hide the evidence.  Idiot. At some point as things progress as he is walking along on a rather bright lit day (for whatever reason) after having taken his pictures he pauses to light a cigarette from the end of another cigarette and feels a tug at the back of his coat. Not a tap to the shoulder. And not a tug at the arm fabric. The tug would be like the pulling of a train cord or a toilet flush the centre back fabric of the coat a pinch more than enough force to be felt.  He turns to discover the human statue lady rather out of breath still made up (she is always costumed in one way or another the costumes never with any importance or meaning they would be only loosely described and if she were done up as some other person I would have invented a name no reference).  He smiles sort of yawning drawling a grump cough of cigarette smoke in a halved chomp toward her face (it would have been described different probably better) enough that her first words are said as a disgusted turning away while he raises a hand sincerely apologizing having trouble with the words because of the cough feeling down in his throat.  I don’t want you to take pictures of me she says to him.  Please stop.  It is apparent from the soft tone of the Please stop that the whole phrase was meant to be timid polite although the I don’t want you to take pictures of me came across as a gruff ugh from the recoil from the smoke. He pauses and people walk by. And he smokes the cigarette and apologizes and says Oh. Of course. Looks a bit baffled and all. And she a waif walks a few steps backward a click of a turn around. He watches only a moment. Drops a cigarette to step on it realizing that he meant to light a new one from the tip of it mutters some fuck words and then scratches a few matches along the well worn pulpy rough of the reverse of a booklet of matches. Whenever I would go to the cuntsucking bookstore we would joke (my little brother and I) that it was so fucking peculiar that my father would only give us money for certain things (books things like that). But if at the same goddamned time we wanted a toy or a video game or some shit that was even less expensive he would pull out some fucking I don’t have money for that.  We thought his money talked to him.  So sorry dear chap.  I cannot be used for a Ninja Turtle.  I am for groceries and small printed goods. That bit the bit about her saying don’t take pictures of me anymore (I probably wrote it down like that in a notebook at some point or another I tended to do that just so I would have something to do at work there was no chance that I would forget that part of the story as it was the fucking central point of the story sometimes I would circle it sometimes I would underline it often I would underline it turn the underline into a box trace each line of the box an equal number of times usually four and then shade over the words in left slanted cross hatching right handed cross hatching straight up down cross hatching straight side side cross hatching then trace the letters of the words three times each so that they clearly looked as though they were written on top of the cross hatching not below it) would have happen somewhere about three quarters of the way into the book (the point of the thing in my stuff I always tended to say would happen about then or four fifths or something).  By that time the general progression would have repeated five times or so.  Four thousand words or so from the request to him walking home.  But the next day he went back. Set up his camera.  Took a picture. Every hour.  Made sure to leave even earlier than usual.  This repeats three more times.  Him standing in front of her each hour looking through the camera arms lifted out to the side cuddling out from under the overhead cloth.  Walk through the city.  The bus.  Cigarettes.  Juice.  Small water.  Up the stairs.  Home. I masturbated with my own urine for a period of time because I wondered if it would accomplish the thing better. Something. Why ever I did it.  It must have been bizarre to see me walking around in those cut off sweat pants.  When I tired to put myself into playing the role of Dracula in the fucking school play I was just ridiculed by the other people for it.  I was the understudy anyway.  For fucks sake.  Lied to.  Dracula is not the main fucking character in Dracula to begin with.  Fucking lockers.  I never used mine to begin with. This was an absolute favorite of mine for a long time.  I think in total I may have jotted down a paragraph or two. But mostly it was just the buzz of a fucking mumbling around in my head.  I know I went back and forth between if it should go form his perspective to hers.  And for a long time I wanted it to end on the image of him under the cloth arm out and all of that shit.  But this would not have brought it around correctly I did not think.  It would have emphasized the wrong thing (which is a thing that I was fucking terrified of doing).  A novel that ends with a man ducked under the cloth of an old fashioned three motherfucked legged camera arm out looking at basically the person he is victimizing is different than this same person victimizing going home after drinking some juice.  Added to which the repeat pattern would be broken.  I considered having the first passage of the novel being him under the cloth so that at the very least the last passage would be identical therefore making a loop instead of a repeat (a repeating loop).  It just did not work though.  The seams were supposed to fucking show but not to the point that it seemed mother fucking stitched upside down. There was a period of time whether it was weeks or months a recurrent period of time gaps of months between these weeks or months when I would only use one word titles.  I certainly never did (and never the fuck would) go around looking for nice single words to use as titles nor do I have a particularly astonishing vocabulary (additionally I do not mean to suggest that I wanted fancy one word titles) it was just a period of time a recurrent period of time that would crop up every now and again in which I could not bear the thought of a title with more than one word.  It in many ways may have been dreadful to those around me.  Conversations interrupted whenever there was a word with the least bit interesting a sound to it dropped.  Fuck.  Aperture was also a novel where the title suggested the novel (one of many) the word just popping into my head I think (it might have been seen in a brochure but somehow I doubt that) while I was working the reception desk at a rather indistinct rather crumby motel (a beautiful place I am still in many ways deadly in love with it) that was at the time attached to the shell of a diner of some kind (an empty restaurant just sitting there though we were not supposed to go into it). The thing (as best as I can make out) of this novel was that a man living in a rather normal apartment notes the placement of the ventilation grate up on the wall of the place one night overhearing quite distinctly through it either the sound of rather passionate fucking a simple conversation (some combination of the two something like that).  He notices absently while at a get-together at the apartment of an acquaintance in the building that though the floor layouts of the apartments are the same there is no ventilation grate in the acquaintance’s apartment where there is in his (the grate would be sort of up in a corner a dozen feet or so left of the doorway into the kitchen and further into a den room).  Back at his own apartment it occurs to him that due to the placement of the grate and of the placement of his other rooms the ceilings must be lower by a foot or two in the den and kitchen than in the parlour.  He investigates with a bit of cloth drawing little markings on it when he can’t find a measuring tape.  Yes.  Lower ceilings.  It is like a hole poked through his apartment emptying out on his end in the parlour and on the other end he imagines in the apartment that shares a wall with his den.  Idly watching a videocassette too drunk (not drunk too inebriated perhaps but not drunk his thoughts not gotten away from him) to successfully masturbate (he keeps loosing his concentration on his fantasy or else gets caught up in the plot of the film on the videocassette he is watching) he paces around staring at the grate wondering if his is the only apartment with such a grate (other than the apartment where it lets out). I banged on the window door to the comic book shop one evening. I knew I got there just as they were closing. It was even a night that they closed at the usual time.  Begged my way in with I know exactly what I want. And they thought it was funny. Joked with me in a good humoured way and sold me the Steve Rude sketchbook which made me feel good. I bought Will Eisner books from them. But I also bought Dark Hawk and actually thought it was a good fucking comic book. And the Fly (or whatever the fuck he was called) because he seemed to work the same as Dark Hawk did. I had given the fellow some pursuit or another that was meant to connect to the title of the piece (as well as a relationship with somebody not a lover not a sister but some person who was supposed to enter into things as well) but the main reason for the novel being entitled Aperture was that in the middle of an afternoon and with a rather runny nose waiting for some medicine to work he gets up on a chair (actually on a half dozen books thick ones stacked on a chair) removes the grate and crawls his way through the aperture over top of his den to the other side.  Certainly he is greeted by the opposite grate. Realizes he had not been together enough to bring a tool. Awkwardly (as he had not reckoned on not being able to turn around had envisioned descending into the new apartment climbing back in through the hole there face first) scoots his way back to his apartment. Finds himself rather filthy for his efforts and looks around for a screwdriver (an item he ends up having to get at the store several days almost a week later).  The grate is the sort that he could not even look out from behind it due to the slant of the divisions and the amount of dirt (thick tufts of it balls of it like coughed out hair) that had had collected on it.  All the while the novel spends more time much more time outlining some problem he is having at work or something.  With this novel it may have actually been something other than that.  A departure for me.  The novel might have spent more time concerned with some equally inane skewed little thing he was involved in (something about a secondhand shop?  A belt buckle?  Something about trying to earn some extra money by selling things to a second hand shop?). Oh fuck Christ don’t I adore the feeling of being in an elevator.  The scent.  Every fucking thing the fuck about it.  What is there not to like?  Really?  I can’t answer that because I just said I liked it.  Cassettes. Red letter on the white spines. I don’t know.  I collected dust into little piles into my hands brushed them slap slap slap and the dust was fucking gone like poofing magic.  Memoirs Of A Fox Hunting Man?  What the fuck is that book?  Just has always been there.  I won’t read it I am saying to myself.  Oh God in Heaven I will never read that book because I am just so fucking intrigued by it and reading is a bore and a blight and a bore. What was in the other room I remember bullshit scraps of.  The plot was never settled on.  Not plot.  There was no plot.  Fuck.  It was so goddamned important to me though to come up with some interesting story involving the other apartment room.  Not that the reader would know it.  The thing was the other apartment room was certainly empty.  Completely empty.  Empty except for a large disordered pile of letters correspondence that was obviously dropped through the mail slot each day.  He looks through the pile of envelopes reads all manner of different names on the address portion and on the return address portion (though sometimes enough that he seems to get the idea there are the same names on the addressee area).  He divides the piles out but is nervous about that.  Nervous that he will not be able to make the piles look like a disordered heap again (or at least not enough like the particular disordered heap that he found them in).  He takes two or three from each pile (I remember this was sort of based on what it felt like to steal money when I was a child) his justification for the ones he chose being that they seemed the slimmest the lightest to contain the least would not be noticed. He somehow thought that due to how light they were that even if the senders were to insist that they had sent the letters it would make sense to the receiver that they could have gotten lost. Light things get lost easier he would think to himself.  I believe he kept thinking the phrase as he crawled all the way back through the aperture into his apartment. Then back through the aperture to the other apartment not dropping to the floor but to replace the grate (before he left he had cleaned up the floor with a hand towel and a small spray bottle of cleanser he had brought as he had left smudges when he had dropped to the carpeted floor). And then composing lyrics (I lie and say I was kicked out of the band because it is easier and more succinct that explaining the actual process of not being in a band anymore) I decided to put in a bit out of Desolation Angel because it so perfectly synced up with the do do do do do do do do do do do-do of the base line blues My eyes in my hand welded to wheel to welded to wang. Da da ah dah dah dad ah dah. And I found the really thin book Tristessa. So thin. Matte cover. Obsessed to fuck with it although it was god fucking lousy.  Thin books are so monumental.  I like paying for taxicars.  I would even if I didn’t have to. This was all very typical of the sort of novels I would come up with for awhile.  There was no real ending. I never thought that far. But it was very clearly one of those easy narratives because it is the minutia of the experience of the character that is where it’s all fucking at.  I could not have given half of a shit what was going on in the other apartment.  The story was simple.  He hears something through the grate.  He hears something again (fucking I am pretty sure the first time it was talk the second time it was Almost gleeful fucking that phrase seems to have been in there someplace though it might have come from another novel).  He goes though the aperture.  He has to go back.  He goes through again.  The letters.  Takes some.  Leaves.  It certainly would have gone on.  But it would have just gone on that it had already been going on.  Something in the envelopes.  Probably returns the envelopes.  Probably all of the envelopes are gone or some fucking thing when he goes back.  Or one day the cocksucked police are outside of the apartment for some reason and he passes by seeing the envelopes being gathered into bags.  Something.  And on and on.