I’m Your Huckleberry
Author: Val Kilmer
Release: April 21, 2020
Tagline: A Memoir
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Genre: Biography, Acting, Hollywood, Entertainment
ISBN-10: 1982144890
ISBN-13: 978-1982144890
Synopsis: Legendary actor Val Kilmer shares the stories behind his most beloved roles, reminisces about his star-studded career and love life, and reveals the truth behind his recent health struggles in a remarkably candid autobiography.
Declassified by Agent Palmer: Val Kilmer’s memoir “I’m Your Huckleberry” Is Worth Your Time, it’s Poetry in Prose
Quotes and Lines
I let muses, whether people, animals, or places, infuse my life with wonder and mystery.
You will see this book takes twists and turns. Welcome to the pinball machine of my mind. Here, authenticity lives with eccentricity. A delicious diet, if a bit unsteady. My poems, my puns, my spiritual side trips, and the names of friends, both famous and infamous, dropped along the way–I can’t stop myself. I can’t help myself. So come along. It’s dangerous, but indulge me. We will travel with lightning speed because I’ve led a lightning speed life.
I write for relief. I write for healing. I write to view the past more clearly and place myself firmly in the center of Love. I want to get my story out as quickly as possible, but mostly I write because it feels good to share with the world what the world has shared with me.
“Some people never go crazy. What truly horrible lives they must lead.” – Charles Bukowski
I struggle to explain my methodology. I don’t put myself in the same class as Bob Dylan, but I have a feeling if you asked him to explain his methodology of writing or singing songs, he’d simply say, “I just do it.” That four-word explanation, as simplistic as it might sound, suits me fine.
When you dream dreams when you’re young, do them before you have a reason not to. When you are young, that is when all the dreams come true. Believe me, do them all. Nothing bad will happen to you and all things good.
I’ve had several such massive projects in my life, noble causes all. Sometimes they fly, sometimes they float, sometimes they sink. But no matter whether they are completed, they sustain me. I am not a practical man. I’ve never sought to be. It’s not in my nature. Magical realism has an iffy relationship to practicality. It’s not easily monetized. So my documentary on the dangers of nuclear is still unfinished. That doesn’t make me happy. I’m still moved to open the can and complete the film. But if I don’t do it now, it’ll be for the same reason I didn’t do it then: other projects emerge that, for one reason or another, cannot be delayed.
I have never understood the profound fear that forces us to trample every mystery in the wild until there is nothing left but that which is man-made, nothing to make our heart pump out of its chest. I am afraid it is not too far from now when we will wake up and it has all gone away.
There are lots of reasons to make art, but I usually migrate toward the educational aspect of it. I like to learn from art. It’s almost impossible for me to learn in any formal way, yet I love to learn.
I could start an artists’ community, write poetry and plays, and become the wild auteur I saw as my destiny.
I mean, it’s so bad, it’s almost good.
I regret the kitschiness, in a way, because the character himself is one of America’s great pop archetypes. Comic heroes resonate on visceral levels.
You gotta hand it to Batman. He’s far greater than any actor attempting to play him.
I haven’t had a girlfriend in twenty years. My editor–who is not as averse to Googling as I am–says fifteen. But time isn’t real anyway, so what’s the difference? Time is a dimension that is in constant flux, influenced by gravity, and perhaps a timekeeper. The truth is I am lonely part of every day. We all know how it goes.
Help, I need somebody.
Help, not just anybody.
We sing along with impossible yearning to tap our toes to the beat. No matter what we possess, most of us want more, more, more. Is this survival instinct and essence of the human being? Or is it just capitalism?
We dream. We desire. We adapt. We play.
A dream life that sometimes mirrors your reality and sometimes dwarfs it. A career in which make-believe is real and everything else is just the rehearsal.
In the words of Thoreau, “Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.”
“The heart feeds the head and the head seeds the harmonies.”
My old friend Gordo, that serious student of poetry, had a famous teacher who once reminded his most promising pupils, “With poetry you have the opportunity to refine your entire life into a single stone, and you must take every hour to press and mold the clay of your life into that stone, and then in the last half of your life just make sure you are polishing the right stone.”