I Like To Write About Certain Things

You Lived And Died Alone, Especially In Fighters. Fighters. Somehow, Despite Everything, That Word Had Not Become Sterile. You Slipped Into The Hollow Cockpit And Strapped And Plugged Yourself Into The Machine. The Canopy Ground Shut And Sealed You Off. Your Oxygen, Your Very Breath, You Carried Into The Chilled Vacuum, In A Steel Bottle.

I Don't Hold Myself Dictated To By What Everyone Is Saying, By The Tabloids Or Popular Opinion. I Don't Like Bourgeois Values. I Say You Find Your Own Way To Live.

In General, American Life Is More Easy-going. And Civic Pride, National Pride In A Cultural Sense, Is Great In America. I Think What They Esteem In America Is Character And Energy, And Being Different And Superior To Other Peoples. Of Course, Every Nation Feels Itself To Be Superior, But In America It's A Jaunty Feeling, And In Some Cases A Rather Ominous One Among The Super-patriots.

There Is No Complete Life. There Are Only Fragments. We Are Born To Have Nothing, To Have It Pour Through Our Hands. And Yet, This Pouring, This Flood Of Encounters, Struggles, Dreams...

Certain Things I Remember Exactly As They Were. They Are Merely Discolored A Bit By Time, Like Coins In The Pocket Of A Forgotten Suit. Most Of The Details, Though, Have Long Since Been Transformed Or Rearranged To Bring Others Of Them Forward. Some, In Fact, Are Obviously Counterfeit; They Are No Less Important. One Alters The Past To Form The Future.