There's nothing that's more transparently a lie than the line, "I feel your pain." Thank God we can't. What if you could take a pain and pleasure meter and say, "I wonder how much pain there is in the world at this moment? And I wonder how much pleasure?" Which is the greater of the two?

What would you think?

I would say pleasure. You know they talk about "It's terrible to hurt someone -- any human being," but then they forget that life is possessed by many other things too.

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Are you familiar with the term "hypnogogic"? It's the state right between being awake and asleep.

I've been there many times.

For me, in responding to your work, there is a sense of "Oh, this guy could be almost asleep or he could be waking up right now." You know, the voice that you use often has that kind of hypnogogic quality to it.

Some of the writing I do, in what I call the space between awake and asleep, is a sort of device, not only to write, but to slip off. I've written hundreds of things. They're always the same form. They're eight lines long and they always begin, "Maybe the moment ... " And then I'll think of the next line and after I've got eight lines, two quatrains, I'll scribble it down on a piece of paper. And I nod off immediately. For example, here's one I did the other night:

Maybe the moment
has something to do
with what's going on
in Kalamazoo.
everyone's leaving
the town is in shock
where are they going?
To Manitowoc.

Maybe the moment
whatever it means
is under a pile
of old magazines
that I can reread
some day when I choose
to find myself lost
in used to be news.

Do you trance yourself out doing this stuff? I know it trances other people out.

Oh, no, I'm pretty aware. I use some silly truth as a diving board to get into something else. Many winters ago, when we had a coal furnace, I'd go down and shovel and put in some coal, bank the fire. I went down there one night and there was a rat down there. And I thought, "Oh, my God!" So, I bravely went upstairs and closed the door quickly, and worried about the house freezing. Finally I said, "Well, I have to go down and fix the fire." And the rat wasn't there. Well, now that isn't enough of a story. So, I picture myself down there trying to get the coal with the long shovel and I don't go near the rat. And I put it in and then I go up upstairs again and I call my friend with the hardware store and, even though it's Sunday, I get him to open up and I buy $10 worth of rat poison, which I bravely throw in from a distance to the rat, and it kills him.

And I discover that I have nearly $9.75 of leftover rat poison, which I don't want around the house. So, I get in the car and I drive to a neighborhood that I never go to normally and I just throw it out the window. And then I hear later that the dog who used to howl at the moon, a poet dog, died from the poison and all the neighbors in that neighborhood have a theory as to which lousy neighbor poisoned the dog. Of course, I'm quite a few neighborhoods away.

That's the extension. It starts with the rat.

Yeah, it starts with the rat and my fear. And now they do shows like that "Fear Factor." They get white mice and dye them gray and scare girls.

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