Nick Lacans, Private Semiotician

Case One: Blood of a Poet

Photo by Felix Mooneeram on Unsplash

I looked out the window of the Lower East Side office-studio I called home. The neon lights atop Sufi’s Tofu Parlor flashed in an almost detectable rhythmic pattern. I lit the last of my Marlboro 100’s, inhaled deeply, coughed, and then quickly extinguished it.

God, I hated smoking.

A long time ago — too long to remember exactly when — I stumbled out of Brown University with a bachelor’s in Semiotics. In for a penny in for a pound, I figured at the time, so I put a few more quarters in the jukebox and shotgunned a Rhetoric Ph.D. out at Cal Berkeley. Thing followed thing and eventually I washed up here on the shores of the cesspool of critical theory. New York was a shambles of misplaced metaphors and screwed up signifiers. Post-structuralism, postmodernism and all the other fly-by-night rackets had eaten up some of the best practitioners and spat them out in the gutter before they could say Deleuze and Guattari. But I swore that wasn’t going to happen to me:

Nick Lacans, Private Semiotician.

My first few months in the City were a one out of nine. The authorities had been cracking down on the vigilante element in our trade. I had a license to practice — every good theoretician did — but the normal clientele was too spooked to go to any…