Dear Harry Hiller

Dear Harry,

I encountered your comment/inquiry on my poem "mating on the crags" a couple days ago. First, let me tell you that the overall delay wasn't a matter of condescension, but rather a fusion of factors... such as my own problemmatic health. I don't know that I can exactly "explain" to you the poetic word-cluster that I coined, i.e. "the death-star nanny state." What I can do, while pointing out that I am nonetheless a left-leaning almost pro-government sort, is tell you my history with the government of today's U.S.A.... in a very abridged way. My junior year of university found me, after decades of educational torture, a middle-class academic scholarship student determinedly pursuing a degree in English and Literature in order to become a highschool English teacher like my father. A series of coincidences led me, one night, to be accused of a serious crime of which I was absolutely innocent. However, from the start, it became clear that in our county civil rights and any sort of balance in the scales of justice was an utter myth and the deck was stacked against me(they were to later lose a series of law-suits from the A.C.L.U..) This incident, although I was actually convicted of only one low level misdemeanour, ruined my "respectable" career as well as my social reputation among the "liberal" "do-gooder" student population. I was able to successfully work in t.v. advertisedment for a time but the reek of the thing drove me to a professorship in anarchic Thailand, where I might have stayed had I not eaten many meals of seafood tainted with arsenic, all while on vacation on touristy Ko Tao Island. Coming back very ill and finding myself still ostracized due to my belief in chemical mind-alteration, I eventually went mad. Immediately after this Poundian "cage experience," my family repented because medical tests found I was carrying around massive amounts of arsenic and wasn't a marijuana zombie. At this point, my problems were temporarily over as I was again in the good graces of the state, having found a respectable paid position as a madman. I found great joy in being the child of a benevolent government mother; My caseworker was even named Mary. However, due to the arsenic, I was still in great physical pain, and eventually my prestigious, quintessentially liberal doctor prescribed me morphine(I was in severe and chronical physical pain,) and so I undertook the problems and creative advantages associated with an opioid dependence. It was in the midst of this that I met a pretty Irish girl on the steps of the local library and in a couple of weeks conceived my second child, which brought me into conflict with the state which desired to(very quietly) protect this impoverished young lady and her two previously abused sons from the guilty expenses of a third child... but I wasn't having it and made enough noise to scare away the nanny death star which, though largely immune to laser fire, occasionally fears a bad news story. this broke-up the relationship and I soon moved to a nice place, Ashland, Oregon and became the recipient of material left-overs from my upper-middle class family, a nice car, a pure-bred cat, a YMCA membership, and in the midst of this, high at a narcotics anonymous meeting, I met a talented visual artist who was also female and we became lovers and house-mates.
anyway, congrats on your approach to becoming a writer: I consciously took the same approach so far as to choose my university's "english and literature" over their "english and writing option." due to a clerical error, they gave me the "english and writing" degree anyway. I wish you as well your ride on this mixed-up wheel of fortune and misfortune and hope it lands on a synthetic pie-slice you can live with. Have you ever considered using the pen-name Harry Hiller, quite similar to Harry Haller, the sub-hero of Herman Hesse's bizzare classic "steppenwolf..." written while he was grappling with dark forces in Nazi-era Germany, soon to do what all sensible people do: give their farewell to arms and emigrate to Switzerland.
I apologize that I must publish this digittle scribble(though not on this site or under your "real name.") See, I struggle to write much of anything these days and this fills in my auto-biography section.

best of luck,
the con-artist formerly known as,

Sean Lawlor Nelson