in a recent letter i asked mike who his favorite authors were and of course he listed all those beautiful names from history that make my insides flutter, adding "should i even mention shakespeare? he's a given, right?"

of course. shakespeare's the man and if anyone who says they have an appreciation for english literature says they don't like shakespeare, they're full of shit. shakespeare wasn't just a writer, he made artful masterpieces of his words.

sometimes the stories were simple, in fact most of the time the stories were simple, but what most people don't understand is that it takes a fucking genius to be able to write stories that last that long. take, for example, the writers of soap operas like as the world turns and the young and the restless. they're simple, implausible stories that, today, hold no literary or filmmaking relevance, but the audience these shows hold captive are phenomenal. there is some genius to knowing what an audience wants and shakespeare had that down to a minute art, crafting story after story after story that continue to hold captive audiences from generation to generation. it's sheer brilliance, it's marketing in a way. if shakespeare were alive now, he'd be doing what i do and kicking my ass at it. he'd be a marketer. or aaron spelling. y'know, with perhaps a little more class and artistic credibility.

so i was watching midnight in the garden of good and evil last night, one of my favorite flicks, kevin spacey, john cusack and jude law, set in savannah georgia around a trial in which the man on trial may be innocent - what else can you ask for in a flick?

they keep saying there are no coincidences and i wrote back to mike and got to asking the same old questions i've asked a million times over,

mike, how are you always in my head? how is it that every little thing i do see say read hear feel smell, reminds me of you, makes me think of you, makes my eyes get all moist and the sharp pangs of pain and intense missing just shoot through every inch of my body and it hurts so much i almost collapse, my knees beg to buckle and my neck swiftly turns to butter and rubber and jell-o and my stomach threatens mutiny. how the fuck? seriously, how?

how did this happen? how did you infiltrate my mind so easily, so long ago and just stay there? how did it happen? i mean it's just not supposed to happen this way. you meet someone, you fall in love. you don't chat with someone on the internet and not be able to let go of them for a decade. am i fucking insane?

and i left off with some x's and o's and the last page printed out with too much white space so i found a quote from one of his favorite authors, joseph campbell, that read,

"We must be willing to get rid of the life we've planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us."

and, as is the case with most questions, dilemmas and forks in the road i come across, mike, in his far away place, in his prison cell, without being able to say a word to me, led me spiritually, to my own answers. everything that is, just is, and i'm the luckiest human being on the planet to just know him.

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