"This ain't a time when the usual is suitable"

Had a discussion(sun-burned and malnourished but happy, right) as I weaved someone else's car across the lonelier parts of Nevada, post culmination and bearing of witness and drinks in Kerouac's bar, about what sort of inorganic and tractable career-path a writer should take. See, the danger is that one can invest their life's-blood and -savings into learning from some wizened and self-appointed guru of the art, only to find that every other organism with a penchant for typing has learned the same litany of bullet-points and things worth crying over. So the system has its trends and its priorities and its gradually (d)evolving traditions and bright lights and chamber music. Like anything, it regrettably rewards the well-done-within-the expected and falters trying to assimilate the new. Contemporary writing, as exemplified in the MFA or academic system, has tremendous strengths in particular areas. It is sensitive to what picky, elitist readers (read: people who want to write) want: that is a piece's awkwardness is covered up, the theme or point or reason to bother is shrouded in generalities and lacquered for easy consumption, the characters have quaint flaws but are in-the-end good people, the emotions are appealed to in a 'pleasing' manner, complications in diction or experimentation in grammar are seen as over-thought and smart-assed, everyone falls in love and it is either requited or refused, etc etc.

My plan is to dive into this homogenizing malaise and try to somehow keep in mind declarations and poetry I once screamed into a figurative megaphone. Try to remember that art is supposed to somehow matter. Try to keep in mind that the world is mind-numbingly complex and tortuously unfair and interminably unpredictable and suspenseful. So right now, I am working on two stories: one involves an involuntary yuppie's existential anuerysm and the subsequent fleeing into the desert, fiery crash and smoking of jimson weed with the last alien (as in alienated) to escape his company whilst they both try to not die or think about life. There's no crying or subtly inadequate epiphanies, no feel good rounding out where "at least he got _____", there's love and relationships but there's no simple resolutions. I don't want to say what it is, because maybe its terrible. The other thing I'm working on is a story that begins during the contentious speech of a Kwame-like figure, promising the world to a teeming mass of the poor, uneducated and drug addicted as Progress behind him literally collapses. The story than simply meanders out into the crowd with no fixed protagonist. I'm not saying I know how to do this. . . .but I consider the material that I've been exposed to as "paramount contemporary writing", the products of MFA programs and the literary journal institution and all of its trappings, and I think that there isn't going to be anyone that can teach me what I need to learn.