I Lost A Lot of Blood

I need a literary executor, someone to ensure me that if I die my work will be taken care of. Where's my Max Brod? Where's my Stephen Joyce? My Dmitri Nabokov? But if I can't have a literary executor - and really, why should I? - I'd be satisfied with an automobile-driving populace that wasn't a gaggle of ignorant motherfuckers. That way I wouldn't be cut off so often and, as was the case on Tuesday evening on the way to a workshop, thrown off my bike and sent flying onto the latticework of metal grates in the middle of Market Street that cut flesh like blunt knives and leave strange pot-hole-like punctures on the skin. In all likelihood, I may have "required" stitches according to most doctors, but I had neither the time nor the finances to swing that, so it was galloping off to workshop with boatloads of tissues in hand. Workshops can often feel akin to grueling inquisitions on their own merits, but a workshop with blood leaking out of your knee - now that's a whole new experience. If I suddenly die at the hands of one of these ignoramuses on four wheels pulling some harebrained maneuver that's probably illegal, two things are going to follow: a memorable hurricane of expletives from me before I go and an exhaustive amount of work left in various stages of completion.

The above picture is a rarity if I've ever seen one: Kafka and his best friend and literary executor Max Brod, Kafka beaming and shining with the coy exuberance of a shy child. I say rare because it seems Kakfa is one of those writers to have been crowned with the Haunted, Troubled Writer Award, wherein the majority of the reading public, faced with the lack of evidence into who he actually was as a person, extrapolates from both the fiction and the letters he's written and the occasional states of insomnia, illness, and depression he did indeed suffer from that Kafka was a perpetual nimbus cloud of gloom and misery; forget the fact that his writing is often bitingly hysterical, or the rebellion inhered in his characters, or just the general warmth and tenderness he wrote with irrespective of the subject matter and thematic groundwork. Nearly every picture of his used is one of those staring-the-apocalypse-in-the-face portraits. Forget all that other stuff. This is Franz Kafka we're talking about; it's just implausible that he ever had a joyous day in his life. And that just isn't true - nobody is that one-dimensional. So to see a picture of Kafka smiling of all things warms my heart, the genuine and timeless felicity of that captured moment on the beach with his closest friend.

Compare that picture to the artistic representation of Kafka below; oh, the mania! I'm running out of Neosporin. My knee is glistening with antibiotic creams. Fuck cars.