A Forsley Feuilleton: Franz Kafka should have spent his time rolling dice with confidence on the corner instead of writing letters in confidence on the paper – Act Two

There aren’t many like you – members of that almost non-existent subculture of Americans who practice the ancient art of reading words – and the few peers that you do have aren’t reading these words.  They are reading the words in the comment section below that internet video of three beautiful women making raunchy love to Sasquatch under a waterfall.  You – yes you – are the only one reading this Forsley Feuilleton.

I don’t know why you’re reading this. . . maybe your WiFi connection isn’t strong enough to play the rapidly thrusting Sasquatch video. . . maybe your laptop has been on your lap too long, burning your crotch. . . maybe big feet and all they suggest threaten you.  All I know is that you won’t be here for long: Call ‘them’ what you want – Illuminati, Big Brother, Powers That Be, Shadow People, Puppet Masters – but ‘they’ have something on the internet even for your Sasquatch ass avoiding ass.  This something is called gambling, and if a video of three beautiful women sucking Sasquatch’s big feet won’t stop you from reading my Feuilleton, then gambling will.

The leopard pattern spandex and rusted tinfoil sailor hat wearing street schizophrenic said, “Franz Kafka should have spent his time rolling dice with confidence on the corner instead of writing letters in confidence on the paper,” for a reason: us writers, us writers not in cahoots with the Big Publishers and the idea controlling leaders of the New World Order they front for, should – unless we have big feet and a web-cam – be practicing the ancient art of gambling rather than writing for those who practice the ancient art of reading words.  Then maybe, just maybe, we could make a decent enough income to afford green enough vegetables – and our brains would become active enough to realize that this lit-game is impossible to win. 

Whether they involve passing chips from one pixilated hermit to another or rooting for a steroid fueled Greyhound to almost catch a plastic rabbit, games founded on gambling aren’t impossible to win.  Dostoevsky, who Nietzsche called the “only psychologist from whom I have anything to learn,” knew that he would have been better off gambling than writing.  But Nietzsche went mad and kissed a horse. . . and Dostoevsky was afflicted with the need to put words to paper.  Although he tried to spend as much time at the Roulette table and away from the writing table as he could, that vodka guzzling Russian couldn’t stop from writing book after book, one of which was The Gambler.

I never read The Gambler, but I bet if I did I’d know exactly why, just as the leopard pattern spandex and rusted tinfoil sailor hat wearing street schizophrenic said of Kafka, every writer would be better off gambling than writing.  I bet it would reveal how the gambler has every advantage over the writer, even when it comes to odds.  I bet the odds of getting a book deal – especially in this modern lit-game where the last of the readers are busy reading the comments below that Sasquatch video – are far worse than the odds of winning the lottery.  And while the sucker with the book deal has to suck, suck, suck  – the lottery winner just picks some random numbers, like 4 8 15 16 23 42, and gets Lost on the couch with a beer and a blunt.

Even a lottery winner who’s deathly obese, insane in the membrane, and stuck on a hellish island has it better than the writer with a book deal.  There are many kinds of hell: waiting in the grocery line behind an old lady trying to purchase a bag of grapes by using an individual coupon for each fucking grape is hell. . . listening to your Science Fiction obsessed friend ramble endlessly about, um, anything is hell. . . and denying Mother Nature’s sweet, sweet nipples so you can pass a drug test for a job you don’t want is hell.  But that island the deathly obese, insane in the membrane lottery winner is stuck on really is Hell – the same Hell where that priest who took you into his office every Sunday said you would burn if you told your parents what he did to you – and that lottery winnin gambler still has it better than the writer.

I know this because I’m a writer, and I promise you that the hell I go through every week to produce these Forsley Feuilletons is far worse than any hell any gambler goes through.  At least the hell that that deathly obese, insane in the membrane lottery winner is stuck in includes a crashed plan filled with an unlimited supply of heroin that he can shoot up for all eternity.  The literary hell I go through every week – the hell I’m in right now in fact – doesn’t have any heroin in it.  All it has is a blank page and a little voice that scrutinizes every word and doesn’t laugh at a single joke I write.

The only good thing about plummeting to and then rising from hell every day is that I don’t have to worry about sinning.  I can sin all I want.  And I’d rather sin through gambling than through theft or murder – both acts every writer, unless in cahoots with ‘them,’ will eventually have to do just to stay alive.  This is especially true if you’re a writer living in a city like San Francisco where you’ll have to steal loafs of Sourdough Bread to stay nourished and murder at least one landlord to stay sheltered.

So sin I will do – and I will do it in Vegas, baby, Vegas.  I will update you, my only reader, from that city of sin in Act Three of “Franz Kafka should have spent his time rolling dice with confidence on the corner instead of writing letters in confidence on the paper” for the last time, I hope.