got the good(s)?

It's a little like pasta for dinner every night of the week. You wish at the saucepan for speedy boiling, but the wish isn't so much for one instance of boiling to be over with -- it's weeks worth of boiling, years, a compilation of mundane minutes compressed into the kind of thing you can swallow whole, in one go. Ten thousand red lights. Hundreds of farts. Forty busted toilets. Sheaves of cafeteria solitude. Instead it's 7:15 and you're at the stove again, and again, waiting for that good roiling pot so you don't have to chew through another extra fucking al dente batch. So it is with talentless twenty-somethings. I hear that humanities cultivate over a lifetime, that your best work isn't right out of the gate. Rather: a ripening over decades. Rather: you grow into excellence. Rather: talent germinates from good taste sustained. You want the small pains of bad prose and worse poetry to coagulate into a single whole segment -- not snuck into slats of Tuesdays, partitioned into Easters and Christmases. Faith has to be sustained. It's hard. And if there were a horned gentleman (maybe with a violin) willing to strike a deal, it's hard to know if you wouldn't give a great aunt over to diabetic amputation, say, or snuff out an unborn cousin, or swap your mouth for a seam in your skin, trade for a disfiguring scar, a bad desire (perhaps uncontrollable alcoholism), to vomit frogs and salamanders with every sentence, to drink ground rubber exclusively, to eat only the innocent things. Down poisons daily, to produce that immaculate American novel -- and then wither, right after publishing, with your unwatered geraniums. It seems unsatisfactory, merely to have a good soul. (I would assume.) You must also be good at something for there to be zest in a life. And this latter is so damn delectable, in those rare flares, and morality is never anything but uphill ... yes, there is a weak part in me that would make many unsavory bargains. I would hesitate to decline if I was offered absolute genius -- requiring only some foul act, maybe, a devilish choice. Condemn a million strangers to an earthquake? Nothing simpler, David Hume. Just let me keep my little finger.

Wrote this forever ago, textfiled it, intended to edit or add something. Never did, and just dug it out of MyDocuments.