In my old apartment, back in Washington Park on Pennsylvania Street, the woman across the hall thought briefly about buying the house when she found out my father was selling it. She knew I did not work and probably the old widow downstairs had told her I was schizophrenic; I'm not really sure what she thought of me, but she was one of those social, young, fit & professional women who really want to stay away from people like me. I showed her through my apartment since she was thinking of buying the house, and she had every right to see it. In fact, she walked through with two of her young & beautiful friends, as they looked about themselves at the filthiness & cramped space of where I had been living my solitary life for five years. They could see the packed bookcase by the bed with books like the Holy Qur'an, Marx's Capital, HTML: The Complete Reference, The Constitution of the United States of America, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, two different biographies of John Brown, two biographies of Lincoln, The Manifesto of the Communist Party. On the other side of my bed was a narrow wooden desk with more books on its upper shelves, and a manual typewriter next to a stack of manuscript pages strewn about haphazardly. On the table where I had my computer were several unpublished manuscripts; on the walls were my very bizarre, genital-neurosis-based paintings. To a woman like her, one of those young bourgeois flashy professionals such as are seen so much here in Denver, such as I had seen many more of in LA, I must have seemed like an urban Kaczynski, a terrorist hermit, an obsessive isolated paranoid, writing out radical political doctrines, psychotic theories-of-everything--the type of loser so many of whom grow frustrated at the publishing establishment that quite rightly ignores them as wackos and who sooner or later will snap. She probably imagined herself telling camera crews after I had snapped, "He was always so quiet. Pretty much kept to himself. He was polite and friendly and courteous, but I never really spoke with him much." The truth was, I hoped she saw me this way: I was proud to be such a psychotic hermit, with esoteric mysteries unfolding on manuscript pages--such was my idea of what a true genius is, while most people tend to think such people are mediocre nutjobs. I wanted to be that insane, reclusive intellectual, the present world's answer to the 19th century's mad scientist--such was my conception of genius, never recognized until after death and no, probably not even then. Such is the world's idea of the ultimate loser, I know. Perhaps I will grow sick of this self-image eventually; perhaps the world will convince me finally that to be such, is to lose in life, fail, remain poor & unrecognized forever. Maybe I should just get a job and forget it.