I don't know what Winona's people do with our fan-mails when we send them to the address, any address, because there seemed a while back as if there were three or four. Or maybe even five. Some went to California. . . . . others went to New York.

However, my ass was bound squarely here in St. Louis like a demonic cripple doing "wheelies" with smokin' rims and fire decals as I fished through the 'net.  As always, if you pay cheap-- you get cheap. . . . . like a grftin' point n' click bastard who had "nothing but time".

That is, "to think up an angle".

And my sources-- as always-- were somewhat unreliable as I drifted among the pick-nosed offerings that all seemed to lead in a dead-end circle like swooping vultures of lowest common-denominator fandom. . . . . . the same pout-mouthed jpegs. . . . . duped factoids. . . . . . butterscotch worship usually posted below banners directing me to yet another online start-up that soon went defunct with the early 2000's tech crash like messianic tech muppets about to go over Niagra falls in a barrel (-- along with their beach-front property dreams & transhumanist "end-of-history" posturing of bejeweled Indian elephants and happy, waving bicyclists waving in Denmark on a "World Tour to Nowhere").

The stock market ticker-tape machine continued its fraud as the numbers raced along the bottom of the screen of cable news as blond bimbos and lunk-headed "camera jockeys" acted like they were remotely in charge with the cocaine hype of big money and lumpen riche entrepreneurs and analysts who couldn't buy class in our plastic, white-washed, nip-tucked world of media conglomerization and puke-stained limos, putrid with sleaze and Oxycontin bile in one pea-green slush of neo-liberal exorcism from the bonds of "commonsense".

So began my tiny, inconsequential fretting that was as far removed from the business of the day as the flat-worm is to "The Great White Shark". How will I know if she'll read my pitiful missive, even if in my conception she was a beautiful creature who did not run with predators. . . . . ?

There was no answer to the question of what happened after the curtain closed as the movie house, other than stage-managed interviews and press releases from a steel-hard publicist who would guard her client like a lioness watching her cubs.

And there was nothing better to do, but "surf around" and "get a feel" for what kind of characters were floating around in "the cyber sea" like "fellow travelers" in the warm slime of worship.

If I thought I was "flat-worm", these fans were worse.

Clusters of "fan-boys" in their '30s, 40's, and 50's gathered around the message boards or crudely-designed sites like primitives gnawing on hotdogs. They had fallen even deeper than I had through the cracks of society and lived like a sappy brotherhood inside "a cult of personality" that was into the outward trappings of the actress in question, but not "the life-force".

I thought of hoarders, animal porn, post-mortem ejaculation when their parents plead with the coroner to come up with any kind of story other than what was apparent in their son hanging their in the closet with a noose around his neck and his pants around his ankles like a "Chester the Molester" cartoon in Penthouse.

I think, looking around, it slowly dissipated the childish idea that presumed that somehow, somewhere, there are 100%, strong-jawed, all-American intellectuals-- experts, top people, in other words-- who are diligently working on problems around the clock like a monolith of uncompromised, snappy brilliance. Whether you happen to click around on a post-toasty "culture mag" of spike-haired hipster weirdos acting like faggy dishrags, or watching a lunk-headed news flack cut to the manufactured, "infotainment" clip of "some insider" trying to act remotely important when they go on about whoever's shit-stain on their sequined dress at the PETA/ACLU/NAMBLA bash, a picture speaks a thousand words when they can't-- or won't-- answer some very obvious questions as they're caught with the deer-in-the-headlights awkwardness of a very blunt question, and just sort of "slink off" and pay you "no notice" with an insincere smile and "a skipped beat" in the running fabric of a presentation "you didn't quite believe".

If you continue to believe that "it all somehow exists over the next hill", then you might as well snuggle down deeper into your rut and watch the slurry of what passed as t.v. and count on others to competently report on the stories, or "to bring the revolution to you" in easy, bite-sized bits that you can consume like a lazy, overgrown dependent fingering his balls in lieu of more constructive pursuits. Perhaps even buying into "the buzz" of the culture industry (-- such as it is) with tilted, "conflicts-of-interests" or investing in "hot stocks" you read about in the magazines for the easy fantasy of sky-high profits without one lick of work or a minute of critical thinking that steps back with an echo as passerbys scoot past you on the sidewalk and figure to yourself, "the world doesn't work that way".

But I was like Nietzsche's idea of man being like a rope strung between animal and "Superman" in Thus Spake Zarathustra, in that wherever you go there is a violent shaking and sickening uncertainty. One can either choose to "lay low" out of fear or advance forward to the other side by marching in the footsteps of valor until it becomes your own walk.

At the time I was cowardly, fearful, and base. . . . . like lead.

And to whomever read the primitive version of what I sent, like putting a message in a bottle and throwing it out to sea, I was hardly impressive as "another whacko" in the pile. They had seen it all before, that urge for someone on the outside to be part of something greater than themselves, on the edge of a swelling balloon of papparazzi-frippery that expands with prestige and high purpose and big money and media excitement. The yearning all rises up in one voice, all of various quality but crying out for the same thing.

I'm betting that the definitive one came in for Winona by the spring of '95 when the slackers were festering like mold under a campus radiator and boredom & ennui was at its peak. Pick-nosed websites. Jpeg archives. Doodling newsgroups that went back seven years like jars of flaked skin. For what is this activity, but a venting point for idle daydreams that you'd get to possess a fantasy figure in your college dorm. . . . . assuming that you weren't so much of a basket-case that you even went to college instead of "laying low", praying for some kind of "miracle"?

I came on to "the bandwagon" a little late. This actress and I ran in different cultural and artistic circles, one toward the left-wing, alternative, or prestigious like offhand conceit and myself like a Hamburg Wharf-rat burrowing in sheer bargain-basement derangement. If you had mentioned to him that "The Academy Awards" were on television, he would have said "the hell with this" and flipped on a random "Police Academy" movie from an old grungy collection of video tapes, for DVD's do not apply. "Little Women" would have got him thinking about a gag from an hokey old Warner Brothers cartoon from the '30s and "How to Make an American Quilt" would have got him grousing about feminism and "the quilt of diversity" that irritated.

Tell him about "The Age of Innocence" and he'd think back to a time when he was 9 or 10 and the world wasn't so frightening or complicated. . . . . a secret memory of a movie called "Beetlejuice", a screwball "feel-good" movie about death where he definitely remembered the teenaged goth-girl who seemed like the coolest person in the world.

But he never caught her name. . . . .

But finally he did, and was floating in the clouds like the ether. He had been in love before but it had proven to be very dangerous. . . . . all but scalded and emotionally-disfigured as if a series of land-mines had gone off in his face like screeching agony, the fall-out of cartoonish social rejection as he blundered into his own grave-- as if already dug-- and hiding in the house from life's brutal knocks.

He was lingering on like a combination between a "whipped dog", "a bad fart", and a fat, google-eyed "Cookie Monster" jacking off in a pile of crumbs because the cupboard was bare, famine had arrived, and frankly he had nothing better to do with himself.

The world was so deeply rotten and he was so rattled and distrustful that he had just about "written his life off" and "closed up shop". The "where" and "how" of it, he did not know. Betrayal was constant and here he was alone in a dark house, listening to a crying wind in the dead of autumn. The leaves skittered with pathos, foretelling wintry doom and the clawing hand of death.

But he had lit a fire, you see-- and was warming his hands.

The joke, the soft-focus fantasy, the wild whoop of laughter was that a magical limousine would show up in response to his letter and take him to California where he would be the ragged bum shoveling potato chips into his mouth at a classy party. Someone snooty would turn up their nose at him, and he'd shove over the punch bowl with a detonation of glass and leave with Winona on his arm over the crunched crockery. Then he'd wipe his ass with the window curtains. . . . . and then kick the table over like a cruder, drunker American version of Dudley Moore.

What would I contribute to this relationship?! Lay around the house like a sponge, I guess, and compose more flattering doggerel. Or write half-baked screenplays! Or snooze as Winona cries tears of joy at her lucky find, vacuuming and dusting in the other room as I snored and drooled before she came in and sucked my filthy dick.

Yes, any day now. . . . .

In the meanwhile, behind the wall on Winona's end, there were problems with emotional insecurities and an addiction to painkillers that would make that epic, opium-inspired poem, "The Court of Kubla Khan" seem like a momentary distraction. . . . . and it would be only a matter of time before the whole prestigious edifice was going to come "splorching" inwards like a rotten pumpkin and she'd end up in the net of law enforcement like a thrashing shark, as true of a predator as anyone in order to feed a habit that was now bigger than she was.

In my warped, juvenile consciousness when I heard the news blasted over the internet, it felt as if I had been punched in the gut with a deep, nauseous feeling that you can only experience when the family cat gets run over by an on-rushing car. You struggle to retrench, when your world of comfy, sickly-sweet illusion "that all is well in the universe" no longer "adds up". . . . . for me, the notion where there could actually be that one perfect girl existing just for you at that one perfect moment somewhere off in the magical night. My world of kitsch had died, "the denial of shit"-- or all of that which is unpleasant. Yes, girls have assholes. No, don't turn away. They obviously do, because Winona was strip-searched down at the station-house when the police took her there to be booked and finger-printed, if not gawked at by the night watchman.

What are we, but jellyfish spurting through the ocean through bodily jets-- like the cloaca, the human drainage system, my own shame of being human and fallen in this world of grime, friction, inefficiency and waste where sweat and weariness pulled you down fitfully into sleep with exhausted blood and fried neural secretions? Whether you liked it or not, natural process happened. . . . . as inevitable as erosion or death or the falleness of man.

After a flurry of media interest and a sensational trial, the world moved on and the machine never dies so long as there is an industry. Hollywood has become our secular religion, "some kind of answer" for the uncertain, the milling Judy Garland fans at the bottom engaging in the most degraded kind of icon worship and the same fans on the Winona Ryder message boards all these years and years later, not doing much better. She was just a docket number, fed through the system like everyone else. Action, consequence. A wonderful lesson is to be had, if we can learn it.

I have concluded that it is up to us to build a better cathedral in devotion to the life-force, what film can only hint at, and not rely on the rotting shroud of celluloid like so many false hopes and media-generated non sequitors. Anything else is a perversion of the life instinct and must be shown a better way through example.

And breaking this vow, "Beetlejuice" should have got the Academy Award. . . . .

*******************

"You want a-nuther song? Well I ain't plain' one mutherfuckin' note until someone comes up here and puts sum money in my god-damned tip-jar! You know I only came here for one purpose. . . . . to take yor fuckin' cash! Why, I could make more profit puttin' out my meth-head neighbor's asshole and ringin' a bell, hollerin' 'Man for sale! Man for sale!'

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

(Rheeee of Crickets)

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

("I heard that, Missy!")