>>2
But seriously: Since there clearly are one or two users of this board who have the culture, insight and discernment to recognize the points of analogy and affinity between Burroughs and myself, I can only wish you'd pipe up now and again in the Tinychat when I am being besieged and devoured alone against tremendous odds, like lion by a pack of jackals in a George Stubbs painting.
I am indeed, not only in terms of age, a man very much like William Burroughs - someone who is daily at grips with a sorrow too deep for tears but who has the dignity and strength to forge on through the darkness like Duerer's Knight flanked by Death and the Devil, and to allow his pain and sadness to show forth only in the infinitely melancholy cadences of his prose. And 95% of the other users of this site appear, not only in terms of age, to be people very much like the unfortunate and pathetic William Burroughs Jr., who inherited the same terrible sorrow but not the ability to master it and turn it into art, and lived out his short, ugly life as a burden to himself and others, seething with resentment and self-pity and depemdent on drugs and medication to a depth that his father, for all his much-publicized addictions, never was.
For all that, though, I suppose,yes, there IS a dumb appeal for compassion - an appeal directed, maybe, only to those very "few people" mentioned in the OP's post - even in the sword-sticks, revolvers, and "cold eye cast on life and death" of the elder, much greater Burroughs. The three hours of savage bitterness in the Tinychat occurred immediately after a typical 30-second apparition of Stephanie's and - much as I sympathize and concur with the "hard-boiled" attitude that Burroughs borrowed from Chandler and Hammett - I cannot, in all honesty, deny to others or myself that there was a direct connection between the two.
My love, my love, there is a limit to the suffering and fruitless longing that even a heart like mine can bear. Please, let us put aside our masks at last and let our hearts speak the frank and secret language that is theirs alone.