“RAIN CORRIDOR: Down and Out in St Petersburg and Clearwater, 2023-2026”
So I plead “no contest” to a lurid catalog of first, second, and third degree sex felonies back in
2016, enter the monkey-house straightaway: one full decade of prison barbarism wherein I find
myself confronted by the very essence of my grisly plight. Forfeit. The truth of it all emerged
during my long examination of this phenomenon, in hindsight, as I sketched out and then wrote
the 3,000 page love story My Kate Like the Seashore. I found myself reliving a long series of
forfeitures, like pleading “no contest” to the rural squalor and imbecility of my 1980s
Pennsylvania childhood. Or surrendering all miracles of youth to a long vanquished 1970s
nihilism, for a few years of coked-out late nights in a barren Manhattan of the 1990s. And then
go west, ruining my good looks on Hollywood and the worst old whore I could find, as if in hot
pursuit of the debauched, prematurely enervated young man I surely did become. And in the
American Midwest I approach middle age as a sinister and violent alcoholic, go shivering ten
years up and down snowbound suburban infinites. Of the north. Come to rest, finally, as a
denizen of the American tropicale, as an elemental spook. But during all 50 years of this life, this
purgatorial living, I never once managed a legitimate connection, any sort of “relationship”, with
any of my nation’s people. Furthermore, upon completing My Kate, I saw that I’d been a terrible
byproduct of American junk culture, of commercial industrial, all along. A product of products. In
2023 I emerge from ten years of daredevil ape-wrangling in Apalachee C.I. without a penny to
my name, going unarmed and alone into rawest free world Primordia, of Gulf Coast swampland,
a pariah in a pup-tent. Find me today broken down and made anew, unto that sweltering vortex.
Unto Florida. Unto the land, as I acclimated, to rodents and reptiles, to cloudbursts and strange
lights in the palm-lined sky. To entropy. To the metastatic life. And down the rain corridor I go, in
all that tropical profusion , conforming to heat, to uncontrolled regeneration and brand new
instincts, to the earth’s own proper electrical grid, as a God-made mammal– Fusing in my 49th
year— To the land itself.
RAIN CORRIDOR will be available in paperback via Amazon in the spring of 2027, with a limited
edition signed hardcover, offered directly from TRIGGER WARNING, to follow in summer.
Subscribe to mailing list for that and other announcements. Email genegregorits@gmail.com ,
with “subscribe” in the header.
-Gene Gregorits Pinellas County Jail 6.26.26
