You may or may not be familiar with Paul Auster. He’s on the NPR station. If you hurry you might catch him.

The whole thing is about this guy’s greatness and prolific body of work. From the interviewer’s perspective, anyway. I imagine the eager interviewer as skinny, white, wearing thick-framed glasses and a sweater. His body language is of a young Greek boy before Aristotle. Paul’s got a more modest sensibility about him that I like, which means I listen to him.

“I haven’t learned anything,” he says. “The experience hasn’t taught me anything. I have to learn everything all over again when I write a book.”

I paraphrase, but it jives with my way of doing things. That’s something else I heard on the NPR station: everyone wants to be validated. They want to know that what they think and feel and do is alright by someone else. Someone like the great Paul Auster.

To be honest, I haven’t read anything he’s written. That is a list that extends to the death bed.

If I tell you I’ve skipped English class (the only class, the only place to nurture writing) four times, it’s alright to be a marm about it. Scold me, perhaps.

A pause for a secret: the thrill I get from taking over during sex is only multiplied by the thrill of a woman being equally aggressive and demanding. If it is untoward to segue all writing into sex, well then.

I skip the class because I respect the teacher and the students too much to show up with nothing, which is all I produce these days.

Affairs are the sort of thing I understand now. Cheating, too messy for me. But to be on the receiving end of a lonely woman’s unfulfilled state of being. Mercy.

When asked, “have you been writing?”, I respond, “I’d rather fuck.” And that is a problem that can only get worse before it gets better. When a wife is alone at a bar she understands what this means. An animal is an animal is an animal.

I’d like to hear someone on the NPR station talk about it.