If Dolan ever bothered to come down out of the moribund Berkeley Hills he’d find a city teeming with life, youth, and energy. I appreciate his desire to criticize that which he sees as hypocritical or evil in the world, but seriously, choose your targets with a little more care next time. Only the rich and the boring/bored can afford to be so negative.

Way to fit your hollow analysis into what I said.

I’m not talking values here. So stop with that “good for you” bullshit. You seem to get that there’s a fine line to walk in order to make it big. Do you understand that it’s necessary?

If ya really wanna get real with it, you need to talk about whether or not any of it matters. What’s it all anyway?

One huge sick joke.

And if you don’t know that by now, you’re lost.

See the good doctor’s previous essay. This is his (and the Exile’s ) critique, that today everyone has to hustle everything and everyone is in competition with everyone else, including within families, within relationships. The ’softer, moister’ world is long gone. One of the big lies of popular culture is that this kind of 24/7 competition on each and every level is actually good for you, you come to some glorious place because of it. The hustling, constant selling of yourself takes its toll, you may ‘arrive’ somewhere but in the process may well lose your original intention that set you on the road in the first place. You may have a hard time recognizing yourself when you have arrived. Paradoxically, the people you suffer the most from this cheer the hardest.

It’s easy to glamorize the past, but they (the Exile) do seem to have a point.

It becomes clear that Dolan is writing from experience and his words are lessons for younger folk.

Apparently this man did his thesis on De Sade. Only an idealistic fool would do a thesis on De Sade - a fool who had bought all the lies about ‘doing what you love’. There are a gazillion other topics that could be sufficiently interesting and also allow for a reasonable career. (These are *not* mutually exclusive).

Don’t take your ideals too seriously, this is actually very good advice. Even the antidote - a ruthless professionalism as demonstrated by the Elaine character - can become a perverse idealism of its own and leave a person miserable.

So the point is that in this life don’t take anything too seriously. Your ideology is not real, nothing can match the overwhelming indifference of mother nature. Everything is impermanent and we would be wise to absorb a couple of good lessons that can easily be gleaned from the good doctor’s (and many others who have come and gone) writing

- Sex is good for you. Sex, love and all that jazz is had best when you are young. Or you can look at it this way, you’re not going to be having much of it at fifty. And at fifty if you wish you were twenty, well as idealistic as you could be thats not going to happen is it?
- Everybody has to have a job, some kind of work that at least some of the time engages and occupies you. So what? Everyone has to wake in the morning and do the morning things. You don’t complain about that do you?

Come on man … you’re oversimplifying with that Harper-Collins bullshit. The reason Dolan ain’t published large isn’t because of his subject or writing, it’s the fact he won’t play the game … go ahead, laugh, but books don’t sell themselves … you gotta hustle that shit. He spent the majority of his life writing poetry, but didn’t kiss asses: no big break going there. He spent that same chunk of his life trying to sneak his way into academic posts, but had a thesis on SADE, and, again, didn’t kiss the right asses: ho big break going there, either. EVERY great writer has to weasel his way into the right positions, even if it’s just for a while. Look at Hemingway: he took what he needed … then he stabbed all those fuckers in the back. Everyone’s gotta thrash around, the right way, to make waves … then ride em.