I don't want to be me anymore. And I don't want you to be you anymore. I'm sick of everybody being who they are. I want everybody to switch selves with the person next to them. Now. Switch.

Last night I was at a poetry reading arguing with three other poets about the world political situation. Then I mentally stepped back and started observing the WAY we were all arguing. If we were a quartet playing a sonata, well, let's just say we were four instruments out of tune. No harmonies were reached. Four blaring opinions. I decided to shut up for a few minutes and hear what the other people were saying. Then a couple other people started shutting up too, and it started turning into a good conversation. We all shook hands at the end and felt a lot better.

Maybe all the smoldering evils and vengeances of the world can be smoothed over, like stepping on broken glass. Maybe I'm crazy, but I think there is hope for humanity. Not a hell of a lot of hope. But, there is hope.

I want a simpler world. I like it when people smile. I'm tired of airplanes crashing into things when I close my eyes.

Well, you know, I wanted to be a crane driver when I was a kid. I think I was inspired by Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble. They looked like they were having fun. I don't know where the hell I went wrong, but it's years later and I still never drove a crane.

But I do build stuff. Here's some of the things I've done the last few years:

	Literary Kicks This is basically my main gig. It's sort of taken on a second life since January 2001, after I introduced a new message board area that has grown in a lot of unique ways. We're also gathering a pretty impressive library of articles about alternative and experimental writers from Lord Byron to Tuli Kupferburg and everywhere in between.
	Summer of the Mets This is the novel I've spent the last few years working on. It's kind of a high school revery and coming-of-age thing, but I hope it's also more than that. Anyway, it's the book I wanted to write. It's finally out and costs only $12.00 here.
	Notes From Underground This is one of my favorite projects. I had this crazy idea to make a full-length digital movie with $2000 and a Sony camcorder and distribute it on a CD-Rom. It took two years and almost killed me, but I think the movie came out pretty damn good. Phil Zampino, Liza Sabater and the other actors really captured the spirit of this Russian classic. NOTE TO SELF: writing poems is easier than making films.
	Coffeehouse: Writings from the Web Goddammit, this was a good book. It was also, verifiably, the first book of internet-based fiction and poetry published in book form. It's out of print now, and me and my co-editor Christian Crumlish are pretty pissed off about this. Contributors included Joseph Squier, Carl Steadman, Mark Napier, Xander Mellish, Lee Ranaldo, Mike Watt, Martha Conway, Robert Hunter and the great Walter Miller.
	Queensboro Ballads In a way, this is still my favorite thing I've ever done. It's a series of stories and essays in the form of a mythical folk-rock album from the early 1960's. You kind of have to check it out to get what I mean. It was written way way back in the days when HTML was still "acoustic" (no tables, no javascript, etc.) so it might seem very simplistic, but this really was what web pages looked like back in 1995.

Story of my Life

But, if you are really interested, you can read my old home pages, which seem to form some kind of history of me. Here's my ever-growing sequence of insanity, for your perusing pleasure:

• November 2001 to October 2002



• September 1999 to November 2001



• July 1995 to August 1999



• August 1994 to June 1995