Sovereignty: In Which the Writer is Finally Received (To Some Degree) – Sean Kilpatrick

February 6, 2025

I flew back to New York after an eight year hiatus of wasted savings to read at one of these oligarchical storefronts warred between scarcely discrepant sets of regalia. Under the right wing awning rests a sexier brand of leather, contemporary Salo wooing my heart condition (Pasolini BBQ)…and under the left, who knows, human nor pinko came to the démodé KGB venue a decade since Christ beguiled us. Our intendant for today’s facility, syntagmatic Big Apple character (Speed Levitch as less a nebbish), thought-bubbled rather ambient jeremiads (uppers being this city’s prerequisite), the disembodied skelp of a dad stepping on his daughter’s bath rag, likeably so. We agreed eye contact should be illegal. I played Boyd Rice as automobile salesman, pushing books at my kind sponsor’s table, observing fellow readers from a safely sexual distance. Many a lady passed by, dainty in her substances. At a certain age, the inability to remain standing isn’t about narcotics anymore (erection granted, apologies). Kid enough to pass through airport security wearing a watch with encyclopedic ridges beveled sharp, I was preserving energy to brass-knuckle a writer who earned my own personal furor for palatal softness on a podcast. He arrived alongside an impish and brutal lawyer, real Supreme Court door pounder, enchanting narc. I prepared to be penetrated at Rikers, God willing. 

Following an Arclight blooper that miraculously added to the shtick, I experienced my first mass psychic bond since wokeness occurred. The impeccably nubuck congregation and I shared a reception reserved, by and large, for musicians. No one ignored the verse at hand. None hooted through my bloviation, zero snarky sideline titters infused by the falsetto left, nigh an SSRI-quip bombinated from post-Lin auto-alt-litery – coke defeated opiates. These costumes commended me better. They were one body my words moneyshotted, a snake-wave response choking closer as I choked them. We went berserk together, a LARP quite far from the be-scarfed tech bros Crumps warned of (even Marxists are above my paygrade, but every class covets the Dasha slap). A random passerby perchance shot some CEO to celebrate. How did they know I cared about Christmas? (See what a little attention can do for the damned?) Pre-woke AD, in the basement of a speakeasy, the girl I was seeing, voluptuously honeyed betwixt pigtails, décolletaged with snug trad gear (before it was popular), sang a song she wrote about us. I could taste her delicious spit in the denouement. A tornado frenzied while we fucked our own wreckage times ten, chafing during the blank duration overhead, a storm of no comparison…I enjoyed nooky with these sovereign individuals a little more. My gloves wrung the microphone dead, reverbed across the swan-throated young, come buckram blast of might made skeet. The so-called righty crowd was willing to enjoy their artist without looking him up first. The left had virtue maps, a topography of gay hang-ups, and their cause’s monopoly forwent style. (As of late, I’ll have much more fun when a king beheads me.)

 

Picture: Sporting Metallica’s Gadsden serpent, tread upon projector light, catwalked across many an inviting participant with shades of Night Porter jam-packing the ambience, serenading myself in dumpy millennial congress with the pond – Berlin’s burlesque never strutted so homely a mode – Shatner’s “Rocket Man” V-2’d into Otto Weininger, Evola’s most denied genocide, poet as the gifted Nikolas Schreck’s rejected ingemination, my having fanboyed a devil that was simply God’s lieutenant, bereft of Miltonian antiheroes to extol, no app match for an amended demon.

 

I excelled at the table, Rochefortian auctioneer for books, greeting yonder nemesis with jocularity because, to top my optics, this supermodel ran up, right in front him and his counsel, quivering girlish accolades. Her dynamited eyes bled cocaine. She looked like a Nickelodeon executive had made her life hell, like Epstein eloped with the product…We’re all fine now. Feminine grace lost WorldStar a clip. Nearby hot-take contrarians were maligning the byline of Cormac McCarthy’s Teen Pussy tell-all for daring to try adjectives and parataxis with intermediate metoo-isms for yet another groupie rode over by her horse (“ew, your icons are sappy for my trim,” humdrum traducements Joyce Maynard to Lisa Suckdog, muses duped and duping). This jerk brought purple dignities to the billionth sanctimonious cultural rewiring of our arts, glossy stroke-book edition, and I only hate him half as much because a sentence or two exists throughout the fucking blunder, Dworkinite-millennial-media aside. (Both sides love plain prose because it best clarifies their politics; the left will pin an acrid theory to the clothesline of abstraction by mere academic handicraft, and the right can take ten steps into formal elegance before retching, but philosopher kings own the keyboard.) His elucubration became the sole retarded minimalist twitter bon mot of everyone’s discontent. (Read a book sometime, by your preferable offender.)

An actress I couldn’t place identified the exact pattern of jocund elevator speech I was gesticulating over each author’s (legitimately published) paperback. With one long, gloved finger, she underlined how I self-deprecated my self-funded own work (purchased on demand (by me) at life-stifling costs and handed freely to the few who took one) with a curt dismissal in order to conversely ensure any interest in it. Then she left, stealing nothing but a charmed glance, Slavic princess hopped up on pop philosophy and psychology papers, all angles and godless, Red Rooms eyes, slinky in a slinkier dress, abundant taste (and ass) outcompeting abundant money – again – she rewrote my joke (but friskily, endearingly, with the sophistication of a social maestro deserving her immersion). I adored everyone against their will. Peter Vack, Byronic scene lord, radiating what the babes call aura (surrounded by babes with aura), paused before me. Being a big fan of his film Assholes (wild art), of a recent understanding never to upsell an actor (elocution by trade), and incognizant of possible minor beef, above my paygrade (everything is above my paygrade), between the publisher and himself, I nodded, providing space. He picked my book up, inquiring if the heavy mess was a collection. “Indeed,” I confirmed, “twenty wasted years.” The eyeings these people are capable of, quite the cinematic pole vault. “…they weren’t wasted,” he quietly assured, leaving (also without a copy, but I was too wet to complain).

A Pariah the Doll-type gender ascendant trannied overly close (sensing a separate but equal breed of freak), telling a very sweet story of abuses past, and love of Christ. The drugs were mountainous. My writer nemesis (smartly avoiding Lulu dot com’s overpriced red tape) had exited, braving me a copy of his photocopied chapbook. The highest person I’ve ever seen did an extensive line off of it. The snort took longer than the book took to write. The prose (his sass got him a tad ostracized, and I feel that) was the solid quality of a Steinbeckian chat, colloquial jokes anecdotally epistolized, boffo readabilities that should get him somewhere by the time I’m finally on the street. I’d never have cursed it, him (or his), had he (and his) not provoked, but who cares, the problem solved itself. A stout troll would test one’s character, flunking rage, though my temper had already been unending. The hep party was too magic for blood. We pretend wrestled. It was the prank-and-vamp-stuffed aughts all over. My twenties were busy being realized way too late. Instead of an indiscriminate post-reading straggler sneering about ethics and theory, they had the acumen to gift me a MAGA man who questioned my immense lack of logic. I nearly hugged him for his queries. Before we could unleash a giddy gamer-word to celebrate this happy gathering free of teachers, a triumphant return to irreverence spanked and meme’d, sense of play restored, I believe an autist, the only black at any reading in town, who, if memory serves, had actually been the one crowd member, eons ago, to briefly attend, and leave, mid-reading, when I did ole lame KGB, returned, now proudly based, pouring drunken praise, another debt zestfully settled, my jovial client. Our buzz was unkillable. 

The event runner (aforementioned kind sponsor) saved my picayune savings by putting me up. We crossed town on foot in unprepared weathers, first downpour frost of the season. I’d cheaply skipped backup outfits to pack copies for carryon. We quested through sideways-launched rain, through umbrella-inverting gusts, tossed cartoonishly about. Our reading’s host, filmmaker, writer, and man about town, vibe of a buff Crispin Glover from River’s Edge (he accomplished a Breakin’ 2 ceiling dance), withstood my riffs about the small-hat weather employed as punishment for our reading’s success. Later, I’d startle present, the lone focus of a draft, clothes worn like a soaked leech shrieking into the chill of its drink, swiveling awake on the subway with a postural wingwang, minus circulation, rag-dolled by the G-force of my own flow, another bout of dysautonomic fuckery that shut my snout off from behind the sinus, each breath tug-of-warring from arrhythmia to blockage. Forced a showman again via the unintended demands of the sick (afraid to elicit more resentment than normal), I requested an infirmed aside, thinking the third writer with us, a friendly expatriate fresh from ingesting what must be the high-octane fluidities of Brazilian women, might realize I ate the labia off too many cheeseburgers. It was much worse: the forfeiture of my person for any positive outcome. 

My kind sponsor brought me the best portion of Central Park air. His serene demeanor helped as well. We sat on a bench. Some lady’s phone was aimed our way. I caught her in what piddling dyspnea endured, incinerating the image inward. This cunt, I huffed, is waiting to see if one of us might piss on a tree so she can slam her panties recording it, then forward more evidence to the local sex offender registry, masking-tape regret framed with an unplucked anus. But I am guilty of a second-fiddle life stewed in the caldera of trauma pageantry after a doctor got fired for spanking this whore’s prodigy, some over-published body count of prose collectively skanked into a lazy replacement! Bukowski’s arrogance wasn’t a Dunning-Kruger diary that had no blood behind it. He wasn’t dunking bust on his cadre, clicked between boss slut and victim. His crimes weren’t the lamest flavor of blackmail imaginable, culturally okayed, riddled with fellow mids, barren scorn buffeted wholesale from innumerable praise over monotonies shat, amply, beyond death. 

We took an outtake from Santantango walk. I had an esophageal interlude from life, raked diaphragm to brain, pressed taint to meatus like foam through the sprocket of a snuff film starring me in another unagented foray. The one abstraction I read in the sky is that of a supreme malevolence cooled exclusively aloof from the planet’s formation, pinching his parasites for content, but parasites drool sedatives in their host, and, as a writer, of sorts, I offer no such drug. I just type quietly in my quarters, indulged provisional sustenance – I partake gratuitously, if at all, talk about indulgence, I continued, bolstered by hate and refusing to faint. How blatant a subject am I of my tabloid, retold with zero catachresis, rewritten worse than history, toyed in the vulnerability, pumped, either end, through the vape mist of an idiot? Someone ran up and slammed boxing gloves on my fists so I could raise them, but I couldn’t.

He reflected on this display, replying: Even if we are an amoebic mutagen pinwheeled by reddit, even if every conviction wears the disguise of its recruiter – metanoia or not – their prevailing scripture is a post. One cheek gnawed asunder as I turn and present it provides every example necessary, proof of kindness in my ‘foe’s’ swollen gut, endorsed before they pass me back to God, a willing fertilizer – and this sacrifice, flea on Christ composited seemingly for its own sake – forestalls all nihilism by corroborative merit done for heaven, interpreted elsewhere in vain. I do not hate my accusers, my bearers of false witness, because I am not reliant, as they are, on the superficial deposition of man. Hatred is a passion wasted if not used to dislocate the practitioner of sin from their action. They are not the sum of what they’ve done…still worthy of sacrifice, ours or whoever’s. We lash out trying to reconnect our lost pieces to anybody else, spit skin of Eve’s apple floating in what most, in their secular, materialist need, might call entropy, now soldered together, a slight chunk tonight, snatched, as you’ll have it, sir, from the aether. He absconded where I begged to follow – church.