Things You Never Wanted to Know About Matt Amati

Matt holding forth over a bottle of Old Hoot's at his fave haunt "The Frog & Nightgown", January 2002

 

Matt Amati was born in Bangkok, but moved to Chicago beforehand. His strict religious upbringing at the hands of a sect of Jehovah's Witnesses (the heretical agnostic sect known derisively as "Jehovah's Rubberneckers") left him a runaway at the age of nine, unshaven (like many nine-year-olds) and spluttering. His early poems attracted the notice of Harold Bloom, author of the influential and anxiety-causing "The Anxiety of Influence." Bloom encouraged the youngster to shun formal education, via a form rejection letter sent from Yale where Mr. B was T. Dwight Professor of Literature. Buoyed by this praise, Matt embarked as a career as a bagger/stocker at Kroger Sav-More Groceries, where he is gainfully employed to this day, earning a salary in excess of two figures, and such occasional perks as free milk. By night, he preaches his gospel of creative subservience -- "lickin' the boots of yer overlords" he calls it -- to a rapt audience of inebriated cell-phone salesmen and fern pathologists. That he can neither write nor draw nor compose verse is a fact amply proven by this website, which he hopes you will skip over quickly on your way to this one.

by Harvin Weltrit