a portrait of the artist as a young man

I am also a productive member of that community. Citizens or government agencies that are considering financial support of Granada House might be interested in the following breakdown. From 1983 to 1989 I paid almost no taxes, cost two different health insurance companies almost $100,000 in treatments, institutionalizations, and psychiatric care, cost myself and my parents another $70,000-$80,000 when insurance ran out, and cost two different states thousands of dollars when my own support ran out and I had to declare myself indigent. In 1990 and 1991, I paid no real taxes but also didn’t cost anyone anything. From 1992 to present, I have cost family, government, and charitable institutions nothing, have paid well over $325,000 in federal, state, and municipal taxes, and have donated a least another $100,000 to various charities. I don’t know what it cost to put me through Granada House for six months (I myself paid $20 a week in rent, though this was sliding-scale because I was broke), but by even the coldest type of cost-accounting, it appears to me that it was worth it for everyone.

[Y]ou can expect that somebody who’s willing to read and read *hard* a thousand-page book is gonna be somebody with some loneliness issues. Or somebody who’se looking, somebody like *me* or perhaps like you, who isn’t always able to get the sense of intimacy they need.

Turning twenty-four was no minor disappointment. At twenty-one, Edward Van Halen erupted and placed all other similarly-engaged guitarists into a group called *the rest*. At nineteen, Mary Wollstonecraft’s daughter won her gothic bet decisively, giving birth in the process to a sentient seventy-thousand word monster that, more than two centuries later, still haunts readers. Then there was this kid named Wilfred. At seventeen, Wilfred Benitez embarrassed the great Columbian fighter Antonio “Pambele” Cervantes to become the scientifically gifted Junior Welterweight Champion of the World at a time when twelve different guys couldn’t simultaneously make the same claim. They and so many others mocked me.

And meanwhile time goes about its immemorial work of making everyone look, and feel, like shit.

You threw out all the cheese, Charles. How could God hate cheese?

In contemporary religious circles, souls, if they are mentioned at all, tend to be spoken of as saved or lost, having answered some set of divine expectations or failed to answer them, having arrived at some crucial realization or failed to arrive at it. So the soul, the masterpiece of creation, is more or less reduced to a token signifying cosmic acceptance or rejection, having little or nothing to do with that miraculous thing, the felt experience of life, except insofar as life offers distractions or temptations.

For someone who has ceased to believe in his own immortality, life isn’t about achieving your dreams; it’s about finding a way to continue on in spite of them.

Laughter, on the contrary, overcomes fear, for it knows no inhibitions, no limitations. Its idiom is never used by violence and authority.

I am always having it pointed out to me that life in Georgia is not at all the way I picture it, that escaped criminals do not roam the roads exterminating families, nor Bible salesmen prowl about looking for girls with wooden legs.