Hank Hits Back

Hold on now, guy. Just because you like my prose and I put myself out there does not mean that I want to be anyone’s idol. You got it right the first time—even I don’t always want to be me. But that’s not really the point. In your writing you criticize me for my womanizing, my shallowness, and my lack of self-awareness. Have you ever considered that maybe I am destructive because I am too aware of myself and my own foibles? Yes I love women. Not all women, understand, but most of them. I love them because they are women, because they fill the hollowness inside me, and because they are so much more graceful, desirable, and sensitive than I will ever be. Look, I don’t know if there is any essential difference between the sexes, but our culture surely has made it appear as if there is. Instead of debating the essence of humanity I prefer to work with what is in front of me; women are mistreated, objectified, and passed over all the time. My awareness of them is not a correction to these slights, but in desiring a woman I want her to know that I am aware of the unfairness of it all, and want her all the more because she is better than the situations into which she is thrust. What can you say about your own desires? Sure, you are quick with a dismissal and I admit you turn a nice phrase from time to time. Yet in the end, what moves you? My cock is my companion and I don’t care to apologize for it. Maybe if you listened to yours for a bit then you would heed it instead of bashing me. So get over your personality crushes and your ego displacements. I want to live my life in my own fucked up way—so what? Your challenge is to scout your own path, then write about your travels for the rest of us. Otherwise, you risk sitting in the corner like some scared critic who knows more about his envy than what he risks by courting disappointment. I accept my failures because sometimes, just sometimes, I wake up next to someone far better than myself, and in the musky perfume of her tousled bed I hear the words of my muse and these sounds urge me to write, to start again, and to bear failure. Who is afraid now, bitch?